The sacrificial fires of roads not taken.

Last week she was chatting with one of her oldest friends in NYC. She had met him over two decades ago on a shoot, one of those old-school big-budget editorial shoots, with excess, hierarchy, and glamour, that for the most part don’t exist these days. He was first assistant, she was a lowly equipment lugging, be invisible, not paid, 3rd. She knew nothing about photography, harboring instead aspirations of being a designer, this was just meant to be an experience. At the end of the day he asked her if she wanted to go on a three-day shoot up in Woodstock, leaving in two hours, room only to sit in the back of the van with the eq. They have been friends ever since.  

Nowadays they don’t see much of each other, he leaves for months at a time, disappearing into whatever world he is shooting, no strings of tiny hands pulling him back demanding love, attention, or kisses to booboos. When he called her it was the day before he was leaving for a two-month residency in France. They had been texting but, “his old thumbs couldn’t keep up,” the twinkle smiling through the phone. He said he had just finished reading Robert Frank's memoir, American Witness.  Lauded with cockney praise and must reads he also mentioned that Franks talked about the regret of his treatment of his two children, not being present in their lives, choosing work over family, and the eventual tragic death of both of them. Writing down the title she asked him if he ever regretted not having children. Taking a deep breath….No. He never wanted them, knowing he needed total freedom to do his work, understanding that to be fully immersed in his photography he would never be able to be the father a kid needed and nor did he want to be. She knew this of course, in the twenty-plus years she had known him he had never veered off this thought path, his girlfriend of 18 years always knowing that kids were never going to be an option for them. It was a sacrifice he was happy to make in exchange for the freedom to work. The conversation naturally carried onto her sacrifices, the two main ones being having kids and moving to the country. Leaving the hub of the hustle to bring up her babies with grass under their feet and family nearby, exchanging restaurants and galleries for trees and beaches. This move, done before the pandemic made it socially acceptable to do so, came with many warnings of detriments to careers. And yes “they” were not completely wrong. This choice most likely slowed her “success”, as too did having babies. She could no longer race out of her apt for last minute meetings, work for hours uninterrupted, go for a quick coffee with a potential client, or rush over to an art gallery opening. Schmoozy parties and being in the right room were a thing of the past. Instead her “sacrifice” led her to the fertile well of a total immersion into her life, her kids, and nature, inspiring her work in a way the city, she was advised not to leave, would never have been able to.  

The thought of sacrifices stayed with her long after the phone call ended and she realized that as well as happening on larger scales, where you live, career, etc, they also happen in the micro realms of our moment to moments. Our choices, as she prefers to call them, are weighed up and made constantly throughout the day. From the second we wake up we bargain with ourselves, deciding what experience we are going to have and what we are going to forgo. Does she sacrifice that one extra precious hour of sleep in the morning so she can write before the kids wake up or not? These micro choices are not static, changing on a whim or desire, the average, she supposes, eventually adding up to the kind of life we lead. 47 years into her twirl around the sun she has learned what she needs to bring her the most joy, on this micro level, is the balance of having it all! To spend as much time with her family as she does her work and get enough sleep while doing it! This requires discipline and many things being thrown onto the sacrificial fires of roads not taken. Naturally, these rules are broken all the time, a tv show will steal an hour or two of her required 8 hours of sleep, dinner with friends will replace her hour of reading before bed and then of course when she travels for work it all gets thrown out of the window, but the day to day average, the template of her life, her mooring, gives her the warm contentment she has come to view, on good days, as success. But this choice comes with a very high price to pay! While being a freelance artist, spending her days doing what she loves, allows her this freedom, it is at the signifcant sacrifice of financial security. Many times when the waters are rough, the famine far out weighting the feast, she thinks she can’t take it anymore, the anxiety over money clouding any peace. During these times she will consider exchanging this way of life for a full-time corporate job, fooling herself into believing she could still do her art in her free time. But then she realizes she is not willing to sacrifice the time she gets to spend with her children for this to happen, at least while they are small, and so the vacillating roller coaster of being the luckiest woman alive to an anxious, self-loathing moron continues. She has made her choice.