On Loving What I Do

By Christmas last year, I was ready to pack up business and run away. Not literally, of course, but as usual, I’d kept working long past my LAST & FINAL DEADLINE, was feeling overwhelmed about getting everyone their orders before the holidays and hadn’t done a lick of preparation for my own.

About a week before Christmas, I got an email from the mother of one of the preschoolers I’d photographed earlier last fall, ordering a digital file. Amongst other craziness, I was stuck at home during that time because we’d had that huge snowstorm and a plow had yet to visit our street (par for the course – I think a plow has come maybe 5 times in the 5 years we’ve lived here), so I wasn’t sure when I would be able to make it to the post office. I uploaded the file for internet download and promised I’d get a disc out ASAP.

A few minutes later, I got a response back. Part of it read:

Thanks for your help and for the beautiful pictures you took of Elizabeth. She was diagnosed with a rare form of eye cancer in June and had her right eye removed. These were her first professional pictures with her prosthetic eye and they turned out so beautiful. She looks so happy and adorable. I couldn’t have been more pleased.

I admit, I teared up a bit. It couldn’t have come at a better time and it couldn’t have been a better smack-in-the-face reminder not only of why I do what I do but why I LOVE what I do. And this is why. Because capturing kids looking happy and adorable and just like themselves is so fulfilling and so much fun and being able to preserve that for their families is an incredible opportunity. It was such a welcome moment of clarity. It was also a nice reminder of the resilience that kids have – so willing to bounce back, so unaffected, just happy.

In writing Elizabeth’s mom to get permission to share this story, I came across her order from the previous year. Elizabeth had gotten so much bigger and looked so much older than I hadn’t even connected the two. But, as it turns out, that’s Elizabeth sitting in my lap in my bio picture up on top, during my first visit to her school. :)