They teach me what I need to come fully alive and how to move from one moment to another as if life were a scavenger hunt.
They are also the center of gravity, the axis, the omphalos, the pivot, the transversal line that bind my worst fears: to lose them, to see them lost or hurt, to lose myself without having anchored and supplied their basic rights and needs.
Sometimes I get into some sort of inner do-or-die state of mind, a sudden divergence in my habitual style of slow cautious progress, and get antsy about shyness and this apparently natural inclination to underachievement, despite the flaming passion that drives me to photography.
It’s a wild, ambitious, greedy thing: I want a big house (for them to spend the weekends and holidays with me), I want to be famous and recognized as an artist (for them to be proud of me), I want to buy expensive things (for them to feel special), and I’m ashamed of my banal desires all at once. I’m all hollow scared of whatever the wire pulling that might may make them feel fatherless, insecure or unsupported, but also to neglect the artistic values I go after and I’m trying to be loyal as a legacy.
I take the train and travel a great deal of miles every Friday so I can give them the only richness I can offer now: my love, my physical presence, my voice soothing their growing pains and angst, and then I travel or drive back to arrive on time, have a shower and go to work, utterly exhausted.
What does it take to be seen as the only thing you can be and to earn money doing the only thing you love to do in the world? It depends so much on other people’s perception and priorities. Should I sacrifice my vocational dictum to get that money? What would I be teaching them, if so?
Most of the things beautiful and valuable and the people I couldn’t live without, I found during times and situations that demanded a lot from me or pushed me on and over this comfort zone of mine that I seldom probe. But the greatest values and lessons put before me (truth, trust, patience, surrender, love, integrity to face what I am and what I want, standing up for it even if it annoys other people and baffles my ‘likeability’) have arised from struggle and discomfort.
Robert Frost wrote that he had been through a long standing lover quarrel with life.
Maybe I can’t give my girls all the amenities that money can give (yet), but I can be an advocate of their blooming affair with upcoming opportunities and travel a ridiculous batch of miles just to hearten their beauty and breath in the audacious wisdom of their untouched instinct, and to bed cover them before sleep, in such a deep gratitude for their teaching and their existence, which is my most powerful source of motivation so far.
Maybe in the future they can read these lines and find in them the proof of their preciousness, that firm spot on which I stand to move the earth.
Txema Rodríguez
photographer
One firm spot on which to stand to move the earth
Hoist
She just does those things, totally unaware of her talent to stop time or defy gravity.
She humbles me, unraveling the wordless meanings of my own existence.
She makes me think about the way I cringe the dark emotions and how that avoidance is keeping me a homeless while joy is knocking the door at an empty house.
She doesn’t rush the moment, she just hangs on there like a tiny Isadora, dancing, flowing by still orstormy waters, awake, in awe, unconditionally present.
Ines in the aftertime
I know it’s fated. Sooner than later I will go through the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I will have to work it through her precious innocence lost, her first boyfriend, her first break up crisis, her first rebellious declaration of independence, her first everything lousy that might come to her along the way.
And I will see in all her temporary failures, my own failure to fix the world perfect, to model an ideal partner in her mind or to show myself imperfect enough, protecting a romantic mystery of her own making.
And after the mandatory time of grief, I hopefully will find in her come back the comfort of a father, the balmy and cleansing remains of blamelessness, the colors of her childhood kindling the arctic crisp of gray hair and skepticism. And finally, I will feel grateful and enraptured with love and pride, as I’ve always been.
Pledge of the deadbeat dad
I clearly remember the day I found out what was going on. The powerful sense of relief and emptiness numbed every single emotion, including betrayal.
I knew I was about taking the biggest leap in my whole life. My hands against the light reminded me my grandfather’s. Suddenly aged, panthocratic, yet innocent and bursting with the urge of creation. I also felt the whole body shaking, the fear of going mad and then, the rest of fears collapsed in two: losing them and not being enough.
I changed hundreds of diapers with those hands. I shot thousands of photographs over their beautiful faces as they were growing up. Now we have to travel far to spend a short weekend together. Now I am the weak one, the deadbeat dad, even though financially supportive, a hopeless failure.
I suspect they are being lied to or denied their right to hold a strong and encouraging masculine reference. The suspicion wouldn’t hurt me so much if I could keep their hearts and minds from all harm until they are secure, self-assured, self-possessed, self-reliant, self-respecting, self-sufficient enough to choose their own fights, choose their own thoughts and heal their own wounds.
Beliefs, memory and perception are tricky. They can be deeply affected by interference and nasty storytelling. I dread the idea that they will pay the price of our faults. I dread the idea of them trapped in a vicious cycle of lousy relationships just because they were told a horror tale of deprivation, absence and neglect. It’s just unacceptable.
What did I see in my ex? What was I thinking? I don’t care anymore.
I won’t nullify the miracle and treasure of the days we welcomed them to life.
I resist to join the war. I won’t hold on to hate.
I pledge not to bad mouth and brainwash them myself.
I won’t tell them stories of saints and sinners.
My amazing girls still walk on water.