The story went like this.
It's about us.
It's about a small circus traveling around the country gathering memories.
It's called The Mudshow Diaries. It's about making sure my kids stay away from the elephants, trying to find a laundromat in a strange town, documenting a world built around blood ties, and sweat: A diary kept over ten years of traveling with a circus in America became a journey in motherhood and photography, along with an odyssey into the country's forgotten paths and the circus' hidden world. Along the way it also became a journey in belonging - in discovering my family in a fleeting cast, reluctantly, and of finding acceptance, slowly, in this close-knit family that is the circus - love unfurled by tenuous chance, as on a tightrope.
That was before.
Now I'm a single mother before I am a photographer, and the circus is far away.
This is a weekly blog about my journey as a single mother and as a photographer, forging ahead with joy and tears, and absolutely no regrets, to redefine my life.
It's about paying the bills, drying up tears and scrapes, going to ball practice, and sometimes, all the time, or is it ever anymore - the longing to be in Europe to document the refugee crisis, or simply to photograph the faces of recent immigrants here in Columbia, Missouri, where I live - it's about taking pictures of it all because photography is what I do, it is how I breathe, my way through the world.
But now it's Saturday and Saturdays are laundry days.
I'll take a picture of that.
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