Every day, I get surprised by some new feeling or difficulty I didn’t expect. I find myself avoiding certain events, opportunities or conversations and upon reflecting back on them, realise that I’ve done it subconsciously.

For example, it’s been a very long time (probably 7-9 months) since I’ve taken photos of Grace. I’m a professional photographer and I periodically take the boys out for a session, but I do it less with Grace.

My friend, Toyha, and I joke about way we can make portraits of Grace looking normal, happy and able instead of cross eyed, upset and disabled. As she gets bigger and her frustrations with herself are more pronounced, it’s getting harder to be tricky and take photos of her which look happy and normal like the ones you’re seeing here in this post.

So Toyha and I have twice scheduled to take her down to my studio to do a portrait session and twice something has stopped us and twice, I have breathed a huge sigh of relief.

But this pains me. It really hurts that I wouldn’t want to go out and do this with Grace since my entire career and passion is focused on doing it with other children. But this is one of those things I realised I was subconsciously sabotaging. And I realised that I’ve been putting it off for fear of failure. For fear that no matter what we do, I won’t be able to get the shots I used to with her and it will further ground into my reality how very disabled she really is when I’d rather just pretend that she’s not.