I take hundreds of photos every month, and most of them don’t get shared with anyone, let alone online. And yet the moments in time that those photos capture are just as important a part of our story as the other images that I do choose to share.
I originally created this blog as a way of documenting our lives, a way of watching the girls grow into who they’re going to be and a way of remembering who they once were. It’s something I want them to be able to look back on as they get older, because memories fade but (digital) photographs don’t.
It’s easy (and tempting) to only focus on sharing the fun bits, the memorable parts, the highlights and the celebrations. But I’m learning more and more as I continue through this crazy journey of motherhood that it’s really important to me that I capture the ordinary, everyday times that we spend together as well.
The bits of the jigsaw that fill in the gaps to complete the picture.
The tantalising glimpses into who our girls are becoming.
The chaos, the calm and all the moments in between.
This monthly feature – The Moments In Between – is a space for me to share all of those magical bits that would otherwise just stay in a folder on my laptop, never to see the light of day.
SEPTEMBER
September felt like it disappeared in the blink of an eye. It’s been a stark contrast to the last six months of slow. Stepping into this new, different-but-familiar rhythm of school runs and schedules and rules has been both comfortingly reassuring and also, occasionally, wildly claustrophobic. I’ve wanted to cocoon myself in it and escape from it. Sometimes simultaneously.
The house is now empty during the daytime after being full for months on end. There’s only me, working from home, who remains. The quiet between 9am and 3.30pm is deafening. And welcome. And lonely. And wonderful.
I have been ridiculously busy with work, my time filled with helping therapy clients who are struggling hard to find themselves again as the world starts to return to ‘normality’ (deliberately in inverted commas because it’s never going to be normal again, really, is it?).
The hours pass quickly and I look forward to the post-4pm chaos that is the whirlwind of getting home from school: chattering and laughing and bickering; backpacks slung across kitchen chairs; lunchboxes dumped by the sink; and, if I’m lucky, a debrief of the day from each daughter, filled with snippets of funny anecdotes and pride at test scores achieved and interesting facts from the lessons they’ve studied.
We’ve had a couple of weekend adventures and they have filled my heart with happiness and my soul with all the good things it needed, like sunshine and new places to explore and connection.
Spending less time together inevitably means that fewer photographs get taken. At the same time I’ve felt a little bit lost creatively, unable to find the brainspace to pick up my camera and capture our everyday ordinary as I usually would.
This combination means that this month feels a little more sparse in terms of memories captured than in other months. I keep reminding myself that that’s ok, that there are, of course, enough. And there are, I know there are. This is only temporary, much like anything else, and it won’t be this way forever.
These are just the moments in between. And they matter too.
This was our September.
This is us.
