Making memories as a single mum

Journalist and former Tatler digital director Rebecca Cope has interviewed Hollywood’s biggest names and reported from red carpets around the world, but her most meaningful subject is now much closer to home: her daughter, Luna. Since becoming a single mother, Rebecca has turned her lens inwards, using photography to capture fleeting moments of love, laughter and growth.

One of my favourite things to do is to go through my mum’s old photo albums. In fact, I think a lot of my earliest memories aren’t really memories at all. They’re memories of these photographs, many of which have become seared into my brain. A family friend dancing to “The Birdie Song” by The Tweets at my fifth birthday party. Whooshing down the slide into a paddling pool in my garden one hot summer’s day. Standing on a wooden balance beam in the school playground throwing up a peace symbol with my Year Six classmates. So many of these moments would have been lost to me had they not been cemented in celluloid. 

Say what you will about the destructive aspects of smart phones, but one thing that they have been truly beneficial for is making documenting our lives easier. I’ve found this to be especially true as I’ve become a parent – I epitomise that cliché of the mum who sits scrolling through pictures of their baby once they’ve gone to sleep. Reliving moments from the day just past. 

As a single mother, I’ve felt a particularly strong urge to document my daughter Luna’s early years, perhaps because there is no one else to “remember” these moments with me. It’s an insurance policy for my own mind, meaning I can always look back fondly and relive that first smile, footstep and “say cheese!” pose. 

I know that once she’s older, she’ll cherish reliving these moments with me too, and it’ll be obvious how much I doted on her and celebrated her every triumph. In many ways, photography is storytelling, and I want her to see that even though her story might not have been a typical one, it was still so full of joy.  

From the earliest days of her babyhood, I started snapping away. Her first picture is from mere hours after she was born, when I was reunited with my phone after a gruelling labour and emergency C-section. She’s got one eye closed and one eye open, as if she’s winking at the camera. In another, taken in those blurry first few days postpartum, she’s swaddled in the hospital’s lilac muslins and sleeping angelically – unfortunately not a precursor of her sleep personality to come. Then there’s photographs of us breastfeeding, which my doula insisted I’d look back on fondly one day (I do), and our first bath together, where she has a truly joyful look on her face. Both perhaps ones now to show at her 18th birthday party.

A common feeling of the motherhood journey is that it goes too fast. You can’t pinpoint those exact moments when your child’s face changes, or when they stop looking like a baby and start looking like a little person. Being able to trace how my daughter’s face has shifted is one of the most magical things that photography has allowed me to do. I can see the little girl she is becoming in those early pictures, but it’s amazing to see just how different she actually looks as well. And it’s so sweet watching her sassy personality become more and more evident. The almost three-year-old who dresses herself in a princess crown and sunglasses is very much cut from the same cloth as that winking newborn. 

While she looked so much like her father at first, I now see more and more of myself in her. It’s something that, considering the demise of my relationship with her father, gives me a lot of joy to see. She’s becoming a mini-me. Comparing photographs of us at similar ages is a favourite pastime.

Towards the end of last year, my daughter’s paternal grandmother died suddenly. In the days afterwards, I combed throughout photographs of her with Luna, bitterly regretting that there weren’t more. There are just 22, from the handful of times that they met. It seems a particularly cruel number to be able to share with my daughter when she’s old enough to want to learn more about the Nanny she didn’t get to know and appreciate. For this reason, I’m trying harder than ever to capture moments between Luna and my mother, as well as with my sister, brother-in-law and auntie (as annoying as that might sometimes be for them). It’s so important to me that she can see herself as part of a loving family despite its relatively small size. 

Something else I need to get better at? Asking other people to take photos of the two of us together. While I’ve got endless candid snaps of her at play or with my friends and family, I probably only have around 10 of the two of us that don’t involve a mirror selfie. I know that I cherish pictures of me and my parents growing up – it somehow roots us all more firmly in time to see us at different ages together. In the future, it will no doubt remind my daughter that I was a young(ish) person once too, navigating my own path through life, doing the best that I could.