Photography was always something I was drawn to.
First in college when I walked the walls of my alma mater and learned that one could take an extra curricular and learn how to capture an image, expose it to the world as how you viewed that moment, and then look to that world on their opinion of your vision.
As someone who was already enrolled in too many courses, working on a double major with a minor, the class just never rose as priority enough to make it on my schedule.
As social media became the way we expressed ourselves and sites like MySpace and Facebook brought opportunities for creative expression and communication, I learned how images could show connection, importance, and participation in activity that gave an appearance of being part of something. If you were in a group photo showcasing smiling faces and the capture of a good time, then you must be someone others wished to be around… aka worthy of others' time.
But then, when my cousin died unexpectedly my senior year of college, and I found myself lacking any photographic evidence of our time together, I learned that photographs did more than just suggest moments in time… they froze moments in time to remind you what they felt like when memory begins to fail you decades later.
It wasn’t until my wife and I arranged to have our engagement photos taken, in the most serene New Hampshire setting, that I learned that photography could also teach someone in a way that words could not. Those photos, where my heart was undeniable, and I stood in my truth for all to see, showed me that there was a way to explain to my family who had never truly known the women they were about to see in those photos, could and would believe my truth without question.
When I started this blog, I believed that the years I spent practicing photography and working to capture others' memories as they hoped to remember them would provide my readers insight in a way a blog without photos could not. I believed that as I shared our journey with autism, I could show the connection, love and empathy each of our children have, while discussing the struggles we were working through as a family, in the hopes that any misconception someone may have about autism could be challenged by a photo showing a child who is loved and not only knows how to love, but chooses to love in return.
For the last two weeks, I have written incomplete drafts on where to start on catching readers up on our last year, and where we are currently, that simply could t find traction. Although I hope I am able to use them at one point, my stream of thought simply keeps returning to photography- and my why around it.
There is a reason why over the last two years, images of parents struggling, looking worn and distraught, near the edge of no return, have gone viral on the internet, sharing stories of just how hard parenting has been since COVID began.
Sure, I have shared a number of them on my own social accounts, and even written many of my own, that were shared on my behalf as well. But I am going to say what every parent/caregiver already knows about why they’ve gone viral, but never wanted to admit. Ya’ll parenting has always been hard.
True, COVID took down any escape one had from parenting when child care of any kind was no longer an option, an escaping to a workday with coworkers who felt like family was no longer such a relief of a retreat… but there have always been laundry rooms overflowing with laundry that is lucky if it gets cleaned forget folded and put away to be easily accessible when a family member needs to get dressed… there have always been (and will always be) houses where voices bellow from every nook and cranny as they work through whatever hard they are going through, that neighbors can hear without any privy to what the hard is causing such a racket… There have always been (and always will be) individuals keeping the group of humans under one roof going, without ever feeling seen or appreciated.
What COVID did was take away the space to breathe and reset in between all the hard, forcing us all to operate at full capacity, without any space to have “life’s hard things''that we would once have capacity to bear, feel unbearable. As someone who was handed what feels to be a never-ending unnecessarily level of hard nearly six-weeks ago, I can tell you first hand why no photos have come from our last month as a unit showcasing the less-than-hot mess we are functioning at. I can tell you the snapshot of a human I have looked like at morning drop-off in front of so many of my children’s peers and their parents that initiated check-in calls and faces of concern and pity.
But just as I was trying to figure out what on earth I could share lately that could be of any value to someone else on this journey, I found myself chatting with another mom I admire greatly, about something as silly as fresh pasta I found at Market Basket. What had felt like such a selfish treat for myself, as it was not something anyone else in my family would eat, and would take easily 30-45 minutes of my attention away from a chaotic evening hour on a school night, had felt like a moment where I had put myself first in a way I hadn’t since my wife had her injury two weeks before Christmas.
As that mom had shared her excitement I had discovered what she and I both felt to be such a luxury, I swallowed my guilt around what something so simple felt like, and then continued our small talk like usual… until I found myself admitting why I was so excited about the meal that had made me feel like I could breath for the first time in weeks.
Thankfully, I didn’t list out the number of lunches I had made, laundry I had done, rooms that I had picked-up, emails that I had returned, parent-teacher phone calls that I had taken, meals that I had cooked, or dishes that I had cleaned. I didn’t confess that I had begun to resent the sound of “mommy” because all I felt I heard lately was, “Cinderella” which is why I was losing my cool so often and had become this martyr version of myself that I didn’t even recognize, or that everytime someone asked me how my wife was feeling through recovery, I wanted to scream “she’s enjoying every moment of my dream of getting to watch netflix all day with meals served to her and no kids around!”
Instead, I thought it best to ask for advice, because just that day I had spent an hour in therapy and despite that I felt good after leaving, found my presence at home to have not improved, and started to worry if I could really keep going. Here was the perfect insider to ask, so in the attempt to put my own life jacket on so that I’d be able to save others, I went ahead and asked some exhausted and full of self-pity version of the question no captain of the ship wants to be asked: “How do you do it all?”
As the words were sent though the digital atmosphere, and I was able to breathe again remembering the meal, feeling less guilty with the confession, I found myself stewing in a different kind of guilt.
This mom I admired and was so fond of, I had had similar conversations when COVID first started about how impossible parenting during a pandemic was. I had applauded her each time she had posted an activity with her boys that seemed just so FUN and intentionally present for kids, in easy that I wasn’t able to when I was overwhelmed with my anxiety of how to make it through another hour before bedtime when our kids seem to be at their peak of exhausted energy and chaos. I wondered why I couldn’t seem to be that kind of present for our kids, and often wondered what it would be like to parent neurotypicals.
This mom had been someone that when I had the chance to take her family photos, I shouted publicly from the rooftops how truly amazing she was in each share of each photograph of her smiling boys that gazed with such love and appreciation up at her. I only knew of her what she shared through her social channels, and what she shared with me in conversation but she was someone I believed deserved every glowing review one could give her.
I believed that because the first time I had met her, was as a brand new mom, in her home, to take newborn photographs of her first son. She had been a friend of my wife, who had seen my work online, and liked it enough to hire me (and pay me her hard earned dollars as a self-taught photographer) to capture her beautiful family in their first days together.
When I took those family photos a better half of a decade later, skills vastly improved from the first go around, she was still holding closely to two of her men that loved her. The difference was, that in our last shoot, the mom stood proudly with two sons, and in the first, she sat with her husband gazing adoringly at their first born.
This mom that I felt so guilty confessing my selfish reclaim of some “self-care” as I tried to survive what felt like single-parenting and then some, had been doing it for years, not weeks. In that moment of entirely selfish guilt, when I asked her unfairly how she did it every day, she humbly shared some tips and tricks that did make it easier. She said that although she tried to post what was fun or funny about their chaos, they were only moments of the real thing. And that often, she felt everything I was currently feeling. She confessed that on days that the unnecessary hard felt unbearable, she held onto the reminders that her kids think “the world is a really pretty place” as her son had told her one the car that afternoon.
Her humility in that moment gave me the strength the next day to say all the things to my wife, who is still here, that felt unnecessarily hard since her accident, without concern for how it could hurt her, because I had been walking through the last six weeks bottling it up inside like I was alone, and needed to realize I was not.
In what was definitely an emotionally charged discussion, she ironically brought up that we were not that family in the photos we hung on our wall, or that I shared in my blog with you. That what we were in currently didn’t feel like those smiles of love and connection and empathy, implying that those felt dishonest and a coverup to what we show to the world.
In that moment I was able to say clearly, what photos like those mean to me, and why photography has been all I can think about for the last two weeks as I try to find something to share about our journey that could mean enough for someone else to be worth a share.
I don’t believe we take the photos to tell a lie to the world. Photographers, like myself, don’t take ten times the amount of snapshots at a photo shoot, to then spend hours culling those images to find just the right ones to hopefully edit (and sometimes even combine) to showcase a lie of smiling faces of children who look up adoringly at their parents with love. The final result of photos that are shared with the world, that we keep with us over time, as we age, change, grow, and sometimes don’t always stay as the same humans in that photography are taken for one reason: to remind us of the truth as to why this life can feel so unnecessarily hard.
As Glennon Doyle has made so catchy (and a mantra I hold tightly to) from her book Untamed, when we choose to: “we can do hard things.”
We take those photos and have a professional spend hours getting a chosen few just right so that we can look at them during the unnecessarily hard to remember why we are here in the first place, and why it’s important to continually remind us that we can do hard things.
We take those photos in the hope that our kids will remember the moments we show on social media and display them on our walls so that they have something to show to their kids in the years when we are gone.
Through what felt like a never-ending river of tears that had been barged up for six weeks and finally busted through that dam, I told my wife that we take those photos so that when they try to remember this chapter she and I are navigating so poorly, that we figured out how to do it together, and that when you are in a marriage it will not always be easy, and that it will take work and effort, and choosing each other each day to keep going.
We don’t share the hard with the world every day because it’s not what people want to read when they’re scrolling their feeds. They want to think you are who you are in those photos so that there is something to work towards, not just sit in when you have to make the choice to do the hard or not.
But we can, and we are, every day, doing the hard things.
Focusing on the photos that remind us why it’s all worthwhile, and hoping the work put in now, provides so many moments for photos for decades to come.
To the mom who shared with me that every moment isn’t fun and intentional, but it is possible and I am able to choose to do the hard things, you are my everyday hero, and your boys are so lucky to have you.
To all the parents out there, who know what I mean by covid didn’t make parenting hard, remind yourself that what’s hard is when we feel like we are losing ourselves without any time to breathe in between the hard things we choose to do every day.
To the friends and family members who have helped our family over the last six weeks, and particularly to my sister, Granny & Pop-pop, most amazing nanny, and dear C family for continuing to make sure we remember this is temporary - we are forever grateful.
And to our incredible kids, when you read this one day, remember that your moms love you, and are real people trying their best to get through what can feel unnecessarily hard because you three are worth every second of it. The easiest part of all of this is loving each of you. Don’t believe us? Look at all the photos… xo.