Sliding the saturation slider down by 17% doesn’t fix the fact that my son is currently wearing a neon green dinosaur cape over his $47 linen trousers, and I am roughly 7 seconds away from a total nervous collapse. I am staring at 7 browser tabs. One is a hyper-local weather map showing a 27% chance of rain that wasn’t there an hour ago. Another is a spreadsheet I titled ‘Operation: Casual Sunday,’ which contains a color-coded hierarchy of snacks ranging from ‘low-mess grapes’ to the ‘nuclear-option chocolate’ used only for emergencies. The irony is thick enough to choke on. We are preparing for a lifestyle photography session, an event designed to capture the raw, unscripted beauty of our family, and yet I have spent 37 hours engineering this ‘moment’ with the precision of a SpaceX rocket launch.

People spend $777 on fancy hearth rugs and designer firewood, but they never check if the flue is actually open until the room is full of smoke.

“

I sneezed seven times in a row this morning, which felt like a bad omen. Or perhaps just a reaction to the $17 organic lavender spray I used on the sofa to create a ‘calming olfactory environment.’ The absurdity of it hit me mid-sneeze. I am trying to control the wind. I am trying to outrun the fact that children are chaotic, entropic forces of nature that do not care about ‘neutral palettes.’ My youngest has already hidden a half-eaten yogurt tube somewhere in the 107-year-old armchair we’re supposed to be sitting on. This is the reality. The plan is a lie we tell ourselves to feel safe in the face of the unpredictable.

[the weight of the unscripted]

We have reached a point where we treat our personal lives like a brand to be managed. We schedule ‘unplugged time’ and ‘spontaneous adventures’ with the same rigor we apply to quarterly reviews. But true spontaneity is a shy animal; it doesn’t show up when you call its name. It only appears when you are looking the other way, usually when you’ve given up on the 7-step plan and decided to just eat cereal for dinner. My obsession with the ‘pollen forecast’ is a symptom of a deeper anxiety. If I can control the allergies, if I can control the lighting, if I can control the nap schedule-which, let’s be honest, has a 47% failure rate-then I can prove that my life is under control. But a controlled life isn’t a lived life. It’s a museum exhibit.

It takes a specific kind of bravery to let a stranger see the yogurt stain on the 107-year-old chair, but that’s where the soul of the story lives.

“

I find myself constantly contradicting my own desires. I say I want the truth, but I still spent 17 minutes debating which pair of leather boots looked ‘more like me’ even though I usually wear mismatched socks and house shoes. I am a victim of the curated age, constantly trying to bridge the gap between the mess in my head and the image on the screen. Why did capturing a normal afternoon turn into weather apps and snack bribes? Because we are terrified that our ‘normal’ isn’t enough. We have been conditioned to believe that if it isn’t beautiful, it isn’t valuable. But Rachel A.-M. doesn’t look for beauty in a chimney; she looks for structural integrity. She looks for what is solid. Maybe that’s what we should be doing with our family life. Instead of asking ‘is this pretty?’ we should be asking ‘is this real? Is this us?’

The spreadsheet is still open on my laptop. I haven’t deleted it yet, mostly because the 7 different shades of beige I picked for the outfits represent 47 hours of my life I’ll never get back. But I am starting to see the cracks. The more I try to script the afternoon, the more I feel like a director of a play where the actors haven’t read the script and the lead is currently crying because his toast was cut into triangles instead of squares. This is the friction that creates the heat. Without the friction, there is no fire. Without the fire, the chimney is just a cold, dark hole in the middle of the house.

I’ve decided to stop checking the sunset time every 7 minutes. The sun will go down whether I am ready for it or not. The light will hit the trees at 7:37 PM, and if we are mid-tantrum or mid-laugh, that is what will be recorded. There is a profound mercy in the lack of control. When you stop being the architect of the moment, you finally get to be a participant in it. You get to be the person who sneezes seven times and laughs about it, rather than the person who worries if the sneezing ruined the ‘vibe.’

[the beauty of the breakdown]

Rachel A.-M. called me while I was writing this. She found a skeleton of a kite in a flue today. She said it must have been there for at least 37 years. It was tattered, covered in ash, and completely useless, but she sounded genuinely moved by it. It was a remnant of a day when someone played so hard their kite got stuck in the chimney. That kite is more ‘real’ than any perfectly posed portrait I could ever engineer. It represents a moment of pure, unadulterated failure that resulted in a story. My goal for this session, and for my life in general, is to start accumulating more ‘kites in the chimney.’ I want the things that went wrong to be the things we remember.

We are so busy trying to avoid the soot that we forget how good the warmth feels. We are so busy spreadsheets and ‘neutral tones’ that we forget the neon green dinosaur cape is actually the most honest thing in the room. I’m going to close the tabs. I’m going to ignore the 27% chance of rain. I’m going to let the toddlers be entropic. If we end up with a photo of a crying child and a mother with pollen-red eyes, then at least we will have a photo of the truth. And in a world of 7-step plans and engineered spontaneity, the truth is the only thing worth $777.

I realize now that the strategic planning isn’t for the benefit of the memory; it’s a shield against the vulnerability of being seen. If I plan the outfit, I control how you see my taste. If I plan the snacks, I control how you see my parenting. But if I let go, I lose control of the narrative, and that is terrifying. It’s also where the magic is. It’s the difference between a house that looks like a catalog and a house that smells like woodsmoke and old books. I choose the smoke. I choose the 7-fold sneeze. I choose to let the chimney be what it is: a passage for the fire, messy and dark and absolutely necessary. When we stop trying to be the producers of our lives, we might find that we are actually the stars of a much better story than the one we tried to write.

It takes a specific kind of bravery to let a stranger see the yogurt stain on the 107-year-old chair, but that’s where the soul of the story lives, as captured by

Morgan Bruneel Photography

who sees chaos as cinematic.