These days I think, fairly often, of how this chapter of my life will fit into the overall trajectory of my life. Will this be an interlude between mildly boring (or extremely frustrating, by turns) lawyer office jobs? Will this be the time between my transition from one lawyer job which had become horrible for me to a new lawyer job which is more interesting, with more potential career advancement? Or --
Well, let me tell you. There is something that's happened. I have started to hope, again, for a career that I don't merely tolerate, that doesn't just support us financially and give us health insurance, that isn't satisfactory just because the hours aren't bad and the people are pretty nice. I have started to hope, again, that I might be able to turn at least a part of my working life into something that I love. What this means, these days, is that I have started to think that maybe I can become a professional photographer.
I don't know how that's supposed to work. I have a hard time imagining what my life and my schedule would look like if I were making money as a photographer, and I have a hard time (still, if I'm being honest) imagining that enough people would be willing to pay money for my photography to make any sort of real contribution to our finances. I don't know how I'd find clients, how I'd get good enough to take pictures that I'd be proud to sell to people (do you know how many of the photos I take are complete trash?), how I'd run the business side of it, how I'd figure out what equipment I needed (and how I'd pay for it).
But in a way, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter, because I will take a bet with you that I will be taking photographs almost every day for the rest of my life, whether I make any money from it or not. So I have a long time to figure out what equipment to buy (and how to pay for it), to find people who might be interested in owning some of my photographs or paying me to take some photographs for them, to learn how to take better photographs, to figure out what I need to know to have my own little business. There is no rush. I can do this. And realizing that I can do this has been an incredibly empowering realization for me, these past 6 and a half weeks since I've been out of a job.
Due to the generosity of a wonderful friend of mine, I am now taking a photography class, and that's helping with the empowerment, too. It's very similar to the photography class that I took back in 2001, in that it's a class about the fundamentals of photography, and it starts from the beginning - we are learning about stops, shutter speeds, ISO, aperture, depth of field, how to create or prevent blur, how to change the quality of the available light, how to take portraits, how to adjust and print our photos. It's 2-3 hours every Monday night, and 3 hours of lab on Sunday night, and not only am I learning a lot already - and not only is it giving me specific assignment-related reasons to take photos every week - but it also means two nights a week, for six or seven weeks (the lab is only 6 weeks long, but the class is 7), when I leave the house, by myself, while Geoff stays home and puts the girls to bed. And that is also a wonderful thing.
Other recent wonderful and/or empowering things:
- About two weeks ago, while I was on antibiotics for pneumonia and no longer getting up to nurse Annabel when she woke up at night (Geoff went to her with a bottle), Annabel started sleeping through the night, and I mean ALL the way through the night, from 6 or 7 at night until 7 or 7:30 the next morning. She hasn't stopped. (And we didn't have to take any action to make it happen. Halleluia. I shudder when I remember the suckage of going through the sleep training that we resorted to with Katie.)
- Katie's learning to read, or pre-learning to read. I don't know exactly where she falls along the continuum, but she spells out every sign we pass in the car and most words she sees on the tv or computer, and lately when we're heading somewhere in the car we play a game where we identify and spell one letter words, then two letter words, then three letter words, et cetera. She can actually sound out short words now, too, which is a connection she wasn't making in her head until quite recently.
- I decided to play a little Guitar Hero III the other day, and I beat the game on medium in about 24 hours. (I had played it before, last summer when we were in Halifax, but hadn't beaten it.)
- Watching our instant Netflix queue on our tv. AWE. SOME.
- Katie and Annabel love each other. Katie says that she loves Annabel more than the sea and the world and "outer space," and Annabel, who is now a very speedy crawler, would follow Katie anywhere.
- Geoff started a women's choir that I'm part of. We rehearse once a week, and other than the fact that I usually have to deal with the craziness of our two daughters during rehearsals, it's fun and beautiful and great, and something else that I'm good at.
- I lost my job last month and haven't found a new one. But I'm ok. I'm more than ok - I'm happy.
I don't know how this chapter will end, or what the next chapter will be, exactly, but I do believe that the next chapter will be at least as good as the ones before it. Who knows? It might even be the very best chapter yet.
