My biggest regret: Why did I avoid the camera so much when I was young?

I used to think that I shouldn’t have regrets – that if I lived life right, I’d always feel great about my choices. It was partly a sign of the times I grew up in, when the phrase “no regrets” was tattooed on countless bodies and when, in 1998, Robbie Williams sang about how “they don’t work”. But, over the years, I’ve come to understand that even a rich, fulfilled life has moments when we wish we’d done things differently.

My list of regrets includes wishing I’d let myself be photographed more during my younger years.

I grew up during the age of the supermodel, around the time of so-called “heroin chic”. As a big-bottomed brown girl with curvy hips and strong thighs, I didn’t like the way I looked because I couldn’t see myself in popular culture.

I was a sensitive soul, bespectacled, and sporting a monobrow and moustache for some of that time. Though depilation and contact lenses changed things, I spent much of the first four decades of my life avoiding the camera.

I envy the selfie-generation and their ability to photograph themselves without committing every image to film. But I was a teenager before smartphones, when cameras held reels that we would take to the chemist to be processed. Small scrolls of Fuji, Kodak or Ilford film were placed in little black tubs, lids snapped on and handed over. They would be ready to collect a week later, when we would pick up the 5x7in prints tucked neatly into large envelopes and hover over images of ourselves. Looking back, I wish I hadn’t taken myself so seriously; that I’d pulled faces and posed with abandon at every opportune moment.

In my early 20s, I worked as a photographer, doing department-store portraiture. I learned about lighting, composition and how to get the best from a subject. I was good at it and became my family’s resident photographer, hiding behind my Nikon SLR, at weddings, birthdays and engagements. I snapped away, the camera helping me to be present without having to be involved – and it meant that I avoided being photographed.

When I got divorced around the same time, my ex-husband ended up with the photo albums documenting our time together. They hold most of the few pictures there are of me from that decade.

In the pictures that I do have, I now see a beautiful young woman who had her entire life ahead of her, but didn’t know it. I wish I’d cared less about my appearance, that I’d understood that ageing is a privilege and that life, with all its messiness, is worth recording.

Nowadays, whenever I am photographed, I share the pictures widely online, no matter how goofy I look. My husband has a knack for capturing me at my worst, caught in the madness of child rearing, my face revealing the physical and emotional toll of parenting three boys. These are my favourite images.

I do martial arts, and at the end of a class everyone poses together for a picture. I am always a sweaty mess, with slicked-back hair, feeling oversized compared to the rest – but I never back out. I simply want to capture the moment for my children, so that one day, when they look back at old albums, they see me as an individual; someone who was more than just their mother.