Mom and her camera: It’s never 10 minutes

We were at our family’s camp in Meteghan on the Monday of the recent long weekend and my son Justin had just done a backflip into the water while swimming.

I showed the photo I captured of him – upside-down, mid-air – to his friend.

“I wish my mom was a photographer,” she said.

“No you don’t,” said Justin. I immediately knew where this conversation was headed.

“We can’t ever drive past a sunset without her pulling over to take a picture, even though she probably has photos of 1,000 sunsets,” he said.

I can understand his love-hate relationship with my camera. My husband would often say that when the kids were young I took so many photos of them that if you looked at each photo in succession you could see movement – like those flip books of the past.

I didn’t really think the boys were noticing how many photos I was taking of them until one day my son Jacob, who I think was three years old at the time, said to me, “Mom, I’m doing something cute. Aren’t you going to take a picture?”

But I really think when it comes to photos during their childhoods, my job was a bit of a turnoff. When they were younger I would often drag them with me to assignments.

“How long is this going take?” one of them would ask.

“Just 10 minutes,” was usually to my response. But 10 minutes would become 20, or, more often than not, stretch into an hour.

I can recall one Sunday leaving our house to drive to a nearby wharf to get a photo of a lobster someone had called me about. It was a really, really big lobster, I was told. I thought the boys would want to see it.

I was wrong.

“Do we have to go?” asked one. “Yes,” I said.

“How long is this going take?” asked the other.

“Just 10 minutes,” I sheepishly said.

On the way to the wharf my car broke down. Apparently, the car had been leaking transmission fluid since leaving the house. As we waited on the side of the road for help from my family one of the boys, pretty much on cue at about the 25-minute mark into our excursion asked, quite sar- to castically, “Has it been 10 minutes yet?”

Fast forward day.

I’ll admit I’m a sucker for sunsets. One evening last summer I was on my way to pick up Justin at a friend’s house when I got sidetracked by one. When I arrived 40 minutes later than I said I would and apologized (without explaining why I was late) one of Justin’s friends said, “That’s okay. We all told Justin you were taking a photo of the sunset.”

I wasn’t even related to this kid and he knew me so well.

When we left our camp in Meteghan last week I told Justin and his friend that I would take them to supper at the Cape View Restaurant in Mavillette. Before heading to the restaurant, I took a little side trip to the Cape St. Mary’s wharf. First, though, we went to the lighthouse where a to the present park has been developed. It was windy and cold but I wanted to take photos.

After leaving there I pulled over on the side of the road to take photos of the wharf. Then we drove a few feet when I pulled over again.

“Why are we stopping again?” asked Justin. “I like this angle for photos better,” I said.

Then we drove a short distance when I pulled over again.

“I see something else I want to get a photo of,” I said, to a male chorus from the backseat of, “We’re hungry.”

And before we drove to the restaurant I pulled over a fourth time – in the span of one kilometre – to take photos of the surf.

As I was exiting the vehicle I had to laugh as I heard Justin asking his friend, “Do you wish your mother was a photographer?”