#ThrowBackThursday: That will be enough.

I’ve been doing a bit of cleaning up here around the blog. For the first time since I created this blog eight years ago, I began sorting through my drafts folder. Most of them were many years old, half-started thoughts that I never got around to finishing, some quotes that had clearly inspired me. I saved a few things, but most of them simply went into the trash.

Then, I stumbled upon these gems — three photographs of Roman taken in March of 2014. Oh my goodness, talk about heart-stopping.

The truth is that I don’t often go scrolling through my photographs or posts of when my babies were… well, babies. I hope that one day I can do so and enjoy it — but right now, I cannot. The truth is that the first three years of Roman’s life and the first year of Marina’s life — while some of the best days of my life — were also some of the very most difficult. The truth is that while those babies were my greatest dream come true, there were other parts of my life that fell apart finally and forever during that time.

That’s what motherhood does, I believe. It takes a woman and it turns her into something completely different. In my case, it transformed me in a way that I never even thought to be possible. I spent a lifetime believing certain things about myself, most shockingly I believed that I was weak. Even in the times when I thought that I was brave and fearless, I was weak and afraid.

I am sure that it is very different for each woman. It depends where we are in our lives when we become mothers — how far along we are on our own personal, spiritual journeys. While motherhood may change some women only slightly, it changes some women completely. In my case, gratefully, completely and for the better.

Motherhood transformed me. A few months ago I stumbled upon this quote from an Agatha Christie novel. A mother’s love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity. It dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path. I don’t think that I can put it any better than that. “It crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path.” Exactly.

This post has nothing to do with what I originally intended to write about when I created it way back in 2014. If you had tried to tell me then about the journey that I would take over these past three years, I would have thought you were completely crazy. But isn’t that what life is anyway, a series of beautiful and terrible surprises?

The only thing attached to these photographs was a quote– Actually, you can be bad at something, but if you love doing it, that will be enough. I honestly can’t remember any of it. I don’t remember finding that quote or taking these photographs or starting this post. But I imagine that I was planning to write about photography. It was at that time that I was just beginning to really learn how to use my camera and how to edit photographs. I imagine that I was going to write about how bad I was when I first started taking photographs, but that I kept on because of my love for capturing precious moments in time.

All of that seems a lifetime away now, but my goodness these pictures, that sweet little face. His little eye lashes, his ears, those cheeks. He was the sweetest thing that I had ever come to know. He would become the thing that changed me, that saved me, my very best friend.

In finally sharing this post, I have indeed strayed afar from the topic of photography, but I’ll come back to it for a moment just to give thanks for having these precious moments captured — images of a time when my life was a lot different than it is now. The sheer innocence and utter sweetness of my firstborn, beautiful baby. My cup runneth over.