Orange County photographer | Tara Whitney – Orange County's Leading Photographer. Family, Pregnancy, Maternity, infant, Newborn, Baby, engagement photography in Orange County, Los Angeles, San Diego

After I wrote the last six people twelve times post, I immediately wanted to delete it.

It was incredibly hard for me to write, and also incredibly hard for me to allow others to read how I feel. How I truly, deeply feel about a subject. Especially about a subject as emotionally charged as parenthood. I am scared that when I truly share how I feel, no one will understand, and I will be alone.

I am not, nor have I ever been, a very private person. I am an open book. In person, I have no problem sharing personal anecdotes even with a stranger. I don’t take myself very seriously. I rarely get embarrassed. I have nothing to hide. I operate below the surface, meaning I don’t want to bother with small talk. I want to dig in and talk about THINGS. Too Much Information? Never. Not with me. I want to really know the people that come into my life. I want to be a safe place for them, so that they allow me in. And I am a lot of the time, and they do a lot of the time. I think it is what allows me to take the photographs I take.

A lot of people just feel safe with me.

The problem is, I don’t often give myself the same safety net of myself. I have operated most of my life perpetually worried about how I come across. How others see me. I have obsessed for hours after a party about the things I have said or not said. I have chosen not to walk on a busy street alone, for fear of the eyes on me as I cross a busy intersection, and what they may sum up about me from a split second. I have chosen not to stand up for myself or my children, at times, to different authorities (medical, educational, etc), because I want to believe in them, I want to belong, and because I doubt myself. I have put others over myself and my own opinions and thoughts more times than I can count. I have held back on my opinions on politics, religion, child rearing, family, alternative medicine, organic food, vaccinations, the list goes on. Personal anecdotes are one thing – personal opinions and feelings are something entirely different.

I have always tragically walked the line of being extremely confident in who I am, to doubting every single little thing I have ever thought. I remember going into ninth grade, and after having to wear glasses since the third grade, finally being old enough to try contacts. Back then, kids in glasses were teased or bullied. I was teased and bullied. Mercilessly, almost every day of my school education up to that point. Not just about the glasses, but they certainly didn’t help my situation. When my Mom offered the contact route, I remember saying, “No, I don’t need contacts. I like how I look in glasses. If anyone thinks I look like a dork, I don’t care.” Well, I desperately didn’t want to care, but of course I did. The only way I could gain some control was by saying “I’m choosing to wear these stupid glasses dammit! So screw you if you don’t like it!” The only way I could make myself feel better was to fake that confidence. I fully bought into the adage: Fake It Until You Make It. I just thought someday I would make it!

The tag line I chose for my business, “Just Be You”, is so much more than a tag line. It came to me in the middle of the night, many many years ago. It is a flashlight through the dark into the deepest part of my soul – it is me telling me, “It is okay Tara – just to be. Just be whoever you are. The important people won’t care about the messy bits, the ugly bits, the opinions that differ from theirs – they will love you anyway.” It is my mantra, my meditation, my mission statement. But often, it eludes me.

Here on my blog, I talk specifically about a lot in my life. Like I said, I am an open book. A lot of beautiful personal anecdotes are written here. A lot of talking about the other five people who live in my house. But not a lot of talking about me. About my personal opinions. My personal feelings. Also, here on my blog, I have always limited my focus to one thing: Happiness With A Capital H.

When I started this blog, I was being treated for depression. I started it for two reasons. One was to keep in touch and share photos of my children to our far away family and friends. The other was to help me focus on the good in my life. To try and help me realize I had a reason to live, and exactly what those reasons were. It worked. I started seeing things I hadn’t noticed before. I started writing about things I hadn’t noticed before. I started photographing things I hadn’t noticed before. And many of you reading this now were here, reading then.

It has been five and a half years since I started writing and focusing on all the good in my life. I am no longer being treated for depression. I have fought hard and won that battle. To those of you still in it, my heart goes out to you with deep empathy. My specific depression had a lot to do with the choices I made early in my adult life, and why I made them, and on the slow steady drain of mothering four small children all at once. Three years ago I decided I was done with medication and the side effects. After six plus years on and off anti-depressants, I wanted to see what my new baseline was. I slowly, sickly, painfully weaned off with the help of a chiropractor. She helped my body come off the drugs and she continues to help me stay healthy and balanced. That was enough for awhile, but soon the depression and hopelessness began creeping back in. So, I began going to therapy. And my life changed. She helped me realize the why of my depression. And how to move forward with all of the pain and knowledge that comes along with that.

She also helped me to realize that I am doing myself a disservice by only focusing on the good.

I want and need to focus on the truth of my life.

Meaning, I don’t have to change what I am doing – I just need to round it out with a good dose of reality. I need to be able to look and ponder over the good and the bad. The happy and the sad.

I do not want this blog to be a place where people come and then leave, feeling depressed over my ‘fantastic life’. Possibly thinking that I have no suffering. That I make no mistakes. That I have no bad days. That I don’t fail. That I’m not a jerk sometimes. That I look cute every day. That my family is perfect. I only recently came to realize that this could be the case. And if this sounds familiar to you, let me just say to you: I AM SORRY. I am sorry I haven’t realized that it is equally beneficial to show you both sides of my life.

All of my focusing on the good, the happy, the sunshine moments – what I did to make myself feel better – was actually a fantasy I was clinging to, and I was leading other people to believe was my only reality. The fact is, I do focus on those moments. They are truthful. I have never made anything up. I do tend to “look on the bright side”, “see the silver lining in every cloud”, and “drink from my half full cup”. But when that is all you, my reader, gets to see – you never get the full picture. And when that is all I, the person living it, choose to see, I can’t see my whole life the way it actually is. I can’t make changes or see problems. I can’t help someone like Mckenna. The day after I posted a truth like the one I am currently struggling with in regards to Mckenna, I could see that. You got a bigger picture of my life. *I* got a bigger picture of my life. A more truthful picture. We all have our unique struggles. We aren’t alone. And that was a big exhale.

I have felt a shift occurring within me for some time, of me not wanting to sit on the fence of who I am any longer. I have made a lot of changes since I started this blog. And yet, I have kept what I write here pretty static. Pretty generic. Pretty focused on the good. The Happy With A Capital H. Today I hope to give you a much more full picture of who I actually am, right now.

So – here is where I slap down some truth. I think I do have a pretty fantastic life. The life Jeff and I have made has a lot of good. And I write enough about that, that I don’t need to get specific about it now. But I also have a lot of suffering, I have a lot of bad days, I constantly make mistakes, I am totally a jerk to people sometimes, and a lot of days I don’t even shower or brush my teeth. I forget things often. I have a double chin and large pores. I get really sweaty when I am shooting. (One of the only things that actually does embarrass me about myself.) I am sixty pounds overweight. Mckenna has visually disturbing scars on 20% of her body, caused by catching on fire in 2005, and caring for them, and her, takes a lot of work. Some days I wish my kids would disappear so that my house would stay clean and I could have a break. My house is almost always messy. I don’t really have many local friends. I feel lonely a lot. But I am learning to like that loneliness, and learning what to fill it up with that is good for me. I wish I had paid more attention in all of my History classes, Geography, and Economics, because I am a dolt when it comes to those subjects. I make up for it now by being extremely curious and learning as much as I can about the past, and the history we are making today. I voted for Obama, although I don’t think he is the cure for all of our problems. In person, I curse like a sailor and have quite the naughty sense of humor. I just don’t necessarily feel that the internet is the place for me to express that. I cringe inside when I hear the name George W. Bush. I support gay marriage, and feel that the LGBT person is equal to me in every way. I am not religious. After having been kind of “half-religious” most of my life, (Episcopalian, then Christian, then Mormon), my belief system is best understood by reading this, from the American Humanist Association.

If any of those things surprise you, or make you no longer want to read my blog, I understand. And not in a glasses versus contacts way. I really and truly understand because it means you have the full picture of who I am, and you are free to make a choice. I respect your choice. I would hope that this wouldn’t change how you feel about me. But I understand if it does.

And something I didn’t go into on that last post. I didn’t get specific enough about what I was dealing with. My daughter Mckenna has an undiagnosed neurological disorder that causes her to have major agitation over simple household noise, major issues transitioning from one thing to another, (even something as simple as getting out of the car), and obsessive compulsive tendencies. She is unpredictable in when she will melt down, but melt down she does. And often. In a meltdown she screams, she will try to take off her clothes, she will lay down on the ground. Often in public, right where people have to walk around her. She will stop everything she is doing, like a stubborn horse you can’t get to move an inch. You pull and yank on the reigns and plead and beg and they just dig in their heels. So does she. She will yell curse words. This started in middle school – she doesn’t know when not to curse like the rest of the kids. (Around teachers and parents.) She has zero social or safety awareness. She has no idea people like their space, and will walk up to someone and touch them inappropriately as she says ‘hello’, or ‘hi, dude!’ She has no idea that she could get hit by a car in a parking lot. In 2006 she left our house unannounced twice, and took off on foot. One time before 6am, when everyone else was asleep, the other time when the kids were playing outside and I was upstairs folding laundry and didn’t realize she had left. Both times we were frantic to find her, and were lucky we did. After her second attempt, we purchased a $300 personal GPS system that she had to wear for months. If she got more than 10 feet away from the base, her bracelet would ring an alarm. A lot of the time, her safety is out of my control, and I live in fear of what may happen to her next. She is mentally retarded with some autistic like symptoms. We don’t know why and we probably never will. It isn’t for a lack of trying. She is fourteen years old and we have taken her to the doctor to try and figure her out countless times.

One of my friends emailed me something that I thought was so poignant, and I want to share what she said here:

“I think what I love most about this post is that it rips away the curtain.  This fancy curtain that is put up for everyone to see how perfect and beautiful it is on the outside, but if you push back the curtain you get to see what’s real, what’s raw.  You get to see the truth.  And guess what…the truth isn’t all that and a bag of chips sometimes.  And I think it is in these moments of complete honesty that humans can truly relate to one another.  Perfection is an illusion….And the sooner we as parents push back the curtain, the better off we’ll all be.  Because there is comfort in knowing that we are not alone in this situation, that people can relate in some fashion.”

I am so ready to rip away the curtain, and in doing so my hope is that I find even more people that I can relate to, as well as that can relate to me.

Just be.

xo

Tara

We spent all of last week in Huntington Beach, where the little boys were participating in daily surf lessons. The girls sat on the beach reading, making sand castles, and napping. It was a healing week that we all needed. The ocean has magical powers.

I didn’t take my big camera to the beach, but I always have my phone with me. The ShakeItPhoto app is a favorite.

More on the subject of healing and truth, soon. Thank you for the love and the support.

I was unable to really be online through-out the week, so if you are waiting on an email or call from me it is coming this week.

July is going to be pretty hard to talk about, seeing as how I can hardly remember what happened now. What day is it again?

It was the coldest July we have had in southern California in 100 years. I am not complaining.

We took a vacation, but we didn’t go very far. (This photo was taken on the ground of the Orange County fair, after all of us took a turn in a photo booth.) I remember reading in a magazine years ago, about a great way to save money while going on vacation. The people in the article – they called it a “Staycation” and spent time at home and in their city acting like tourists. It was the perfect fit for us homebodies who live in an area full of things to do. We thought it would be perfect for Mckenna, who doesn’t like flying or traveling. And it forced us to get out and do the things we have always said we would do. Like rent a boat, see a play in Balboa Park, go to the local water park, spend a day in Mission Beach, take the kids to a concert, do a food crawl at the OC Fair…

All in all the week we spent together was full of good memories, but it really brought to the forefront something else that is hard to talk about. Mckenna. I don’t often talk about how hard it is to parent a child like her. I choose to focus on the good things, and each good thing is such a celebration that it is easy not to tell the whole truth about our life with her.

But…

Mckenna doesn’t like doing things. Mckenna doesn’t like to be in, what are to her, stressful out of the norm situations. Like vacations. Mckenna would be happiest alone in our house, with no noise except for the noise she creates. With full control of what she wants to eat and when, what she wants to do and when, and the remote control. Her natural tendencies lean toward an isolated hermit in the middle of nowhere. With a Target for dollar stop shopping. That is always empty, except for one cashier and her. Because of this, Mckenna tends to impede on the sense of ease and fun during a vacation, and what really became clear to me on this one is that we need help. What really became clear to me on this one is that my burning desire to have my family unit always together, may be actually tearing us apart.

Now that the younger three have surpassed her emotionally, we are in this impossible place. Parents to a child like Mckenna, but also parents to three typical children like Drew, Nathan, and Anna. They both need us equally as desperately. And as I stare, slightly stubbornly, down the barrel of parenting an adult with special needs, and the rest of my life, I start panicking. I don’t know what this is supposed to look like. I don’t know if I can do this. I certainly know I don’t want to be doing it alone anymore. It isn’t fair to the rest of them. I focus so much of my mothering time and energy on Mckenna, and the rest of them are so easy in comparison, that they get the last bits of me. The tired worn down please just make this easy for me bits of me. I don’t want that for them. Yet, I don’t know how to make a safe place for all of them, while giving each of them what they need. I have thought for so long that I can handle this. That I can be this mother to all of them. That I can make Mckenna happy or healed all while giving the others everything they need. And I can’t. I am feeling my limits crash into me all the while fighting them.

The confusing thing with Mckenna is that there are moments of astonishing peace and joy for her, like when she sat at the front of the boat like a mermaid statue and smiled for an hour as the ocean splashed her face and the boat bobbed in the water, or when we walked out of the Train concert and she said she loved concerts and the next one she wanted to go to was Alicia Keys. Those are the moments that hold me over through the bad ones and make me sane, but they also tease me into believing that she can have MORE moments like that, if only I try harder. If only I give more. If only I fix her.

And I can’t. She is not “fix-able”. Whatever good moments she has, are most likely nothing to do with me. Just like whatever bad moments she has, are most likely nothing to do with me. They just are. They just exist for whatever reason the synapses in her brain allow them to exist in that moment. She is unexplainable and impossible to solve. Mckenna is not free. She is locked up and hidden from me most of her days and most of her life. Those moments that I cling to are few and far between, and yet I kill myself everyday to try and get more of them.

What I saw on our staycation broke my heart. I saw the five us of, wanting desperately to have the kind of time “normal” families can have, time to be free, and failing. And in that failing, feeling completely broken down in moments when she was broken down. And guilty for feeling that way. The flow of the vacation stops and everyone has to stop being who they are, to fit into the box Mckenna needs in order to function and feel less stressed. We are good at it. They are better – they have been doing it all of their lives. I saw my other three children sick to death of people staring at us, the curious public the unintended paparazzi of our outings. Usually our outings are broken up – we spend a lot of time at home in between recuperating. But with several days outside linked together, the staring and the issues involved became overwhelming. Everyone stares. Not just children. Adults, groups of people, will whisper and point and think I don’t notice. I just want to be invisible. For me, getting stared at is especially hard. I think Anna hates it almost as much as me. Mckenna is the only one who doesn’t notice. She thankfully doesn’t have to feel that pain, but the rest of us do.

One of the reasons I fight my limits is because unless we are all together, I feel like we are not experiencing things to the fullest. If Mckenna stays home, I feel weird, off kilter, and guilty. I know that even if there are three hours of hell, she may have one second of bliss in whatever we are doing, and how can I deny her that? This is how we have ALWAYS operated. “Ohana means family – nobody gets left behind!” It is an idea Jeff and I have always had – and our family has flourished in it a lot of the time. But things are changing. Like I said – the other three have surpassed her emotionally. A lot of families have that, with older children and maybe a surprise younger sibling. But it isn’t like having a younger sibling who is a toddler. Because Kenna will never grow out of this. I don’t want them to grow up resenting us, or her, for what we did when we thought it was what needed to be done.

And so I am here, trying to figure out the best way possible to go forward for our family. Thinking of Mckenna. Of Drew, Nate, and Anna. Thinking of Jeff and I. How can we make this new time in our lives work in the way it has worked in the past? Maybe that means getting daily in home help. Maybe that means bringing an aide along with us to care for Mckenna so that we can focus more on the other three. Maybe that means leaving her at home while we do the things “normal” families get to do, with no one staring at us, and not having to mold into her  box, just getting to be free of the locked up parts of her brain for awhile. I know for certain, it means dropping a lot of the preconceived notions I have had for her life and ours.

I am scared. I am uncertain. I am tired. I have cried a lot this month. I wish more than anything for my family to be able to be together, all the time. But what I want even more is for each of them to get exactly what they need from me.

And yet, there are so many reasons for us to be at ease, and happy, and there is a sweet escape in that. We are in love, so in love. We have this great big family. They mean everything to us. We like who they are. It is summertime, and we have no major responsibilities. We get to take them to basketball camp and surf camp and horse camp. We get to watch them explore the ocean in a boat, their chins hardly poking out above life jackets. We get moments of extreme lucidity from Mckenna, where she asks us how to smile. We get to hold hands and scream out songs we sing together in our car, outside at a live concert with twinkling lights and cell phones held up in the sky. We get to nudge to the front of the crowd to show Anna the newborn piglets and listen to her squeal just like them. We get to stay up late in our hotel room, and have a midnight dinner at Denny’s. We get to enjoy possibly one of the last summer’s that Drew will really want to spend time with us instead of his friends. We get to watch him spread his wings. We get to float on our backs in the pool, while holding hands with Nathan, staring up at the clouds. We get to cuddle him at night, because he asks every single night for one of us to cuddle him. We get to plant strawberry plants together in wooden containers in the backyard.

We get to simmer in the life we have made for ourselves, with all the good and bad.

We are the only ones who fully understand what it is like to live with Mckenna. We have each other to lean on. And most of the time, that is enough.

xo

Tara