Once we hit busy season, all time to create for myself disappears so I really haven’t had time to work on my fine art series lately. But that changed once we hit the new year and I’m getting back into my creation mode again. You may recall that this series (which I think I’m going to call The Journey) is a self-portrait series dealing with emotions or traits like hope, strength, anger, sorrow, etc… The many fragments that comprise the whole of a person. You can take a peek at all my fine art work features here. This is an image that popped into my mind one day and I knew I had to create it!

So what is the concept behind this piece? I think there are always going to be times in our lives where we want to take control of time – whether to speed it up, slow it down or stop it entirely. I feel like the last seven years of my life as we’ve been traversing the road of infertility and adoption has been nothing but a time of wishing to have control… wanting to know when and or if parenthood will ever come to us.

While going through fertility treatments I was always wanting time to speed up. Waiting for test results, waiting to discover if the follicle became an egg, waiting to find out if medications worked, waiting for the next chance to conceive… There was so much waiting and you just wanted to get to the next thing. the next chance, the next opportunity to finally bring your child into this world.

And now with adoption I find myself wanting to both speed up and slow down time. Obviously, I want the results of sped up time – a child finally in our arms… but there are often times I want to slow down time because of how long it’s taking to get matched. With a two-year contractor with our agency, and already a year in with no success – I feel incredibly disheartened. I’m questioning if it will ever happen for us. And it makes me want to slow down time… to give us more time to potentially get matched before our contract expires.

I know that I can’t control time. No matter how much I want to. I know that my situation – my hopes and desires – they are unfortunately completely out of my hands. But that doesn’t stop the anxiety or stress or panic of wanting to control time from settling in. And that’s the feeling I’m trying to convey in this image. And it’s something I think we can all relate to in some way whether it’s wanting to slow down how quickly your little one is growing, wishing to turn back the clock to spend more time with your momma before she passed, or wanting to freeze this one perfect moment in time. And since I can’t control time in the real world – I’ll settle for this image… this moment of freezing time. And until then, I’ll continue to watch time pass, do the best I can with what I have, and try to remain hopeful.

And here’s the completed image: