Everyone was having children. Except me. Co-workers. Friends. The teenagers I taught in an afterschool program. The moms at the mall who yanked at their children’s arms and made them cry with curses and slaps.
I received birth announcements. Baby shower invites. I wanted to celebrate and feel joy for my friends, but each new announcement brought a yearning for what I couldn’t have.
Year in and year out, at the Jewish High Holidays, as the Biblical story of Hannah was read, I cried as she wept and prayed silently for a child in such an impassioned way that the guard at the temple thought she was drunk.
As a newspaper photographer, I photographed children everywhere. I was famous for my happy, quirky kid pictures, like it was my informal niche. I loved them – their smiles, mischief, innocence. The sweetness of their faces could take my breath away. Many of the page-one photographs of children were mine.
I was in my early thirties in a marriage challenged by infertility, among other things. Despite a promise that he and I would have a child, and despite having been matched by our doctor with a donor who matched him in certain characteristics, he said no. He didn’t think he had it in him to be a father again. The marriage went from challenged to stressed-at-the-seams. Years passed. Fibroids grew where a child didn’t and I needed surgery to even keep the hope of a child alive.
At work, I was on fire. I threw myself into my photo assignments, learning about people, connecting to social issues, feeling the exhilaration of authentic visual storytelling. I loved making pictures, and the paper gave me the rare freedom to wander and explore with a camera, knowing I could be trusted to bring back stories that mattered to me and to readers.
One day, a student in an afterschool program I taught called to tell me his mother had been shot and killed while hanging laundry. I drove over. He was cradling a vase of fresh cut flowers from her garden, a beautiful bountiful garden on a block in Hartford better known for abandoned houses, drugs and the shooting of an unarmed teenager. His tears poured out. These were the last flowers she would ever cut.
On that same day, a wealthy couple was found bludgeoned to death in a botched robbery less than a mile away in their home in the neighboring West Hartford. They were white. They were philanthropists. They commanded the attention of half a dozen reporters from the paper, two photographers, countless editors and my student’s mother, Edwina Reid, black, poor, unknown in an elite social mileau, didn’t receive as much as a police brief.
Something hit home at that moment beyond the obvious – and appalling – racial (and class) bias. Who was deciding whose life was important and whose wasn’t, and why? What made some people newsworthy and others not? There was a great pool of wonderful people doing amazing things in their lives who didn’t have a voice, who weren’t recognized. I went to the funeral of Mike’s mother. 600 people packed the pews. Again, as in much of my work life, an incredible theme emerged. Rich, poor, black, white, Hispanic, we share dreams and hopes for ourselves and our children. We have pain that we learn from and overcome, and our differences are far less than what we have in common. I became less of an observer and more of a participant.
Through a column called “Rituals,” which I then began writing and photographed, I held the spiritual hands of many who had known loss and pain but who nonetheless celebrated the love and life they had through rituals that exploded with meaning and beauty. My camera and keyboard recorded the stories of foster children, couples reaching 50 years of marriage, a woman in hospice care. When I wanted to take pictures for a ritual on bedtime stories, I went to the homeless shelter and found a young mom who read to her kids and wanted all the same things for her kids as any of us. I was in the company of many extraordinary ordinary people whose struggles and resilience resonated both with me and with readers.
I loved this work, I loved mentoring Hartford youth in an afterschool journalism program, and came to accept that maybe this, not being a parent, was what I was meant to do. I tried to move on.
When my marriage ended, I knew I had a small window to try once more. I was 39 and single. I also was alone, and longing even more for motherhood. I chose a donor – Jewish, from Paris, a marathon runner and filmmaker – and on the fourth try I was pregnant. After she was born, I was blessed with an amazing community of friends who celebrated my pregnancy and wrapped my newborn and I in a loving embrace – quite literally with a handmade quilt, each square of which was designed by each friend.
In this new life, I photographed my daughter incessantly. Once I took a roll of film of her sleeping and asked for double prints. The lab guy was incredulous. What can I tell you? New parents are crazy, drunk with love for our little beings, and now I was part of that group.
I stopped taking many of the risks that go with being a photojournalist. When the paper told me I was being embedded with a US military unit in Iraq for two weeks, I just laughed. I passed on out-of-town trips. I drove more slowly getting to hostage situations, giving the cops more time to get the situation under control. I made myself invisible when they were looking to send someone to a gang shooting.
My column got a little schmaltzy and baby-centric, and was cancelled for being too spiritual. The personal pain and struggle of my childlessness made for good writing. The awe and wonder of new parenthood did not. I quit my full-time job, but I became more passionate than ever about my work, my life and my heart.
Here are my thoughts: we need photographs and stories more than ever, stories that look beyond our differences to the hearts that beat the same, the dreams that we cherish but that can be so easily extinguished without nurture and acknowledgment, but a new model for telling them is yet to emerge.
I still cringe when I walk by a mother yanking the arm of her child in the mall. In my work as a photographer, I’ve seen all too well what happens when kids aren’t loved and understood. Although I’m no longer in the world as (my old self) a true newspaper photographer, I still look through the lens with the same awe and wonder, the same love.
On many weekends now, I’m photographing – among other things – the bar and bat mitzvah of my daughter’s peers. I can’t help but cry at every one. I always loved the crazy, emerging spirit of teenagers, but it’s a mother’s appreciation I now bring to the sacred ritual and the beauty of generations connecting. While it’s not breaking news, it’s personal history unfolding and I just don’t click the button. I connect with my whole heart, catching the fleeting moments that celebrate love and life and make us whole.
Shana Sureck, 52, is an award-winning photographer and multimedia storyteller with studios in Florence, MA and Hartford, CT. Before starting her own business in 2009, she was a photographer at the Hartford Courant for 21 years. She is married to her besherte (beloved), with a daughter and two stepsons, and lives in Northampton, MA. (www.shanasureck.com, www.multimediaforthegoodguys.