Kimberly Rose - Into the Light

 

I was sitting outside CVS. I had just gotten a packet of photos from my daughter’s fourth birthday. It was a big packet of photos. This was like 2009, when people still went to CVS to get photos. At least, 60 photos. I was looking through them, and was really excited. There were pictures of my daughter and my other two kids, and my husband, who was the family photographer, but somehow, he still got in the picture, and their grandparents. And none of me. So, I kept looking, and not even a picture of me and my daughter and I thought for sure there must have been a mistake. I would have bet a million dollars there was a mistake. And back then, they used to give you an index, which was basically thumbnails of your photos.

 

I was sure it was one of those underdeveloped photos, you know how CVS used to take sort of executive decisions and decide, “This photo will not be developed, because it’s too low light, and it’s black.” I thought, oh, they just didn’t develop it. This can’t be possible. But it was. And so, sitting in that car, looking through those photos, I realized that there were no photos of me. That’s how my husband wanted the photo album of his life to be. All of a sudden, I realized that I was never in the photos, hardly at all. There were no framed photos of me in our entire house. After eight years of marriage, I was like a ghost. 

 

When I met him, we were madly in love. I knew by our fourth date we were going to get married. He was 6’2”, muscular, [chuckles] honest, wanted to get married, a good Jewish boy, a doctor to boot. I was the perfect Jewish suburban housewife. I kept kosher. I had five sets of pots and pans. I went to parenting classes and parenting resilient children classes, and parent-teacher association meetings and Zumba class and gluten-ab classes, marriage counseling, and we even went to the rabbi. [chuckles] I did everything I was supposed to. 

 

But I remembered an earlier time where we had gone next door to dinner, and our neighbors had pulled out. We’d started talking about honeymoons for some reason and they pulled out their honeymoon album. There were all these pictures of the bride. I felt sick, because at that point I’d only been married two years and I realized there were no photos of me from my honeymoon like that. I think at one point, I forced him to take a picture of me, because I was so happy I could fit into a La Perla bikini. But other than that, nothing like this. There was one photo in particular of her looking into the camera with these dewy eyes and so much love in her eyes. I didn’t have anything like that. I had nothing. 

 

Sitting there in that car, in that CVS, I realized I was never going to get that. I was never going to get that kind of love, I was never going to be seen and I was disappearing. One of the first things I did after my divorce, was I hired a top national photographer- [audience laughter] [audience cheers] -that I could not afford. At that point, I was a single mom with three kids. I didn’t have time to go shopping. I was not at my lowest weight and I was not tan. And it didn’t matter. They were very, very tasteful boudoir glamour shots. [audience laughter] They were awesome. [audience laughter] It was the best thing I ever did. I’ll never forget the day that those photos came by email, and I couldn’t stop crying. It was as if my soul exploded, and I had come out of the corners and the shadows and out of the slivers and the frames into the light.