America's Most Neurotic Home Videos

For the past twelve years or so I managed to live a very satisfied existence without the presence of a video camera in my home. I have also managed to live without the presence of a microwave, much to the dismay of my mother-in-law, but that's a different blog entry.

When I was about seven months pregnant, I was visiting my father and we determined that I would need a video camera very quickly. Not to capture my son's impending birth on video (I didn't want to see the birth when it was happening, why would I want to sit on my couch and see it years later?) but to capture everything that would come after the birth. First smiles, first words, first feedings, first steps, etc.

And capture moments we have. If anyone wants to come by our apartment and watch a few hours of video of Milo sleeping in his bouncy seat, we have plenty of it to offer. We also have Milo in his stroller, Milo in his exersaucer, Milo being changed, and Milo being bathed.

The first month of Milo's life both my parents kept harassing me to send them video. I tried to explain that I was too exhausted to operate a video camera, let alone attempt to figure out the software necessary to get the video out of the camera and onto a DVD (which, thanks to Sony's ingenuity, is totally impossible and requires not one but three software programs) but they were persistent, and eventually I sent them some video. To which they both immediately responded, "This video is the most boring video I've ever seen." Well what did you expect? The kid is four weeks old.

In any event, the videos are marginally more interesting now, and while I dutifully document every little thing Milo does, I can't help but feel slightly self-concsious as I do it. Because every video I take reminds me a little of video I've seen of myself as a baby, or as a kid, or as a teenager, or any other home video that has ever been shot in the history of time. There are the parents, young and beautiful and happy, marvelling in the wonder of their new baby. There is the baby, cute and round and happy, marvelling at the newness of the world.

And now, here I am, and this time around I am the parent. And some day Milo will watch these videos and think, wow, look how young my mother looks. Or, what were people wearing back in '06? Nice hair, Mom! Nice furniture! What were you thinking? Why are the walls to my room brown? How come all my clothes say Brooklyn on them? Why am I wearing cargo pants, for God's sake? And so on.

It all feels like we're looking back on the past before it's even happened yet. Sometimes we are. Sometimes we shoot video and then watch it back ten seconds later and marvel at how cute Milo was back then, ten seconds ago. But mostly it feels like we are playing roles. Here is the happy young couple smiling with their new baby. That was before we found Jesus/ divorced / moved to Albuquerque. Here is the new baby playing in his exersaucer. If only we'd known then that he would end up in prison/the lead singer of a rock band/president of Bahrian.

It's hard not to see the present and the past and the future collapsing into each other each time I flick the on switch on the camera. Sometimes I don't speak while I film, and I pretend I am shooting silent home movies that we will screen on the wall of our rec room. Sometimes I narrate in my head. Sometimes the camera captures our lives and sometimes it captures lives that are nothing like ours at all.