the ways that family life is exactly the same all the time and wildly different moment to moment–
i’ve never met anything that made me swing from one extreme to the other so violently and so beautifully.
navigating that swing from amazing to awful, from boring to brilliant, it’s challenging. like flying on a trapeze with zero warning and definitely no training. parenthood is the kind of thing that no matter how much you “prepare” for it you can never know until you’re swimming inside it day in and day out. maybe lots of other people aren’t as shocked by all of it as i am, but someone out there is, and so i feel this pull to keep talking about it. okay, that was a lie. i feel a pull to keep talking about it because I HAVEN’T FIGURED IT OUT YET. So i wander around in words and tie them up with nice endings that i believe on my good days, and on the days when i’m sobbing on the phone to my mom and she’s saying, i’m so honored that you let me see this, that you don’t try to put on a good face or pretend, and i’m saying, i would, i just have no idea how!–those days, those days i just have a question mark all over everything. i’m learning to sit with the unknowns and the questions and the smacking up against my own inadequacies and trying to give myself grace a bit more. so maybe you aren’t surprised at all that i love spying on all of you and figuring out how YOU’VE figured it out and dancing together around the circus of family and saying, “what is this like for you?” and “here’s what it’s like for me.” if art is giving voice to something unheard that’s what i’d say: here it is, this is what it feels like, sometimes. swinging on a trapeze and trying to do it gracefully while the only people whose opinion you actually care about watch you fall, pick you up, and love you back to life.
p.s. i have 5 family session spots left this fall to get photos in time for holiday cards! let’s chat about your family session, m’dear. (that means i’ll send back all the pricing info super fast + we can talk dates!)
