Hi, Hi, Hi

We were driving home from dinner, nothing special about the night, just one of those ordinary Tuesday kind of dinners where you’re tired and the car is quiet and you’re just trying to get everyone home and into pajamas, and he was buckled into his car seat behind me looking out the window the way he always did, watching the world go by without saying much of anything about it, and I want you to understand that by this point we had been in therapy for three years, three full years of speech and OT and every kind of prompting you can imagine, three years of me learning to wait for words that almost never came without me asking for them first.

And then it happened.

No cue, no prompt, nobody asking him to use his words, he just started screaming hi out the window, hi, hi, hi, at every single thing that passed by, a mailbox, a dog, a stranger walking their trash to the curb, hi, hi, hi, in that little kid voice that toddlers have where everything sounds innocent even when they’re shrieking it at the top of their lungs, and I remember sitting there in the driver’s seat completely undone, full of joy and tears at the same time because both of those things were true in that car at once, the way they so often are with him, the way they so often are with all of us if we’re honest.

I didn’t know we would be waiting so long for just words, but hi, hi, hi, screamed out a car window on a Tuesday, was the whole prayer answered.

Here’s the part I still think about, the only other words we had ever heard him say without prompting before that night were every cuss word he knew, every single one, and they came out grammatically correct too, which if you know Levi is somehow the funniest and most on brand thing that could have happened, and he thought it was hilarious, laughing at himself, and we laughed right along with him because what else do you do, you laugh, you cry, you let both things be true at the same time and you don’t apologize for either one.

That night felt like a sense of normalcy we hadn’t touched in a long time, and it felt like a sign, the kind you don’t go looking for but that finds you anyway when you’ve been on your knees about something for three years, hope showing up in the shape of a toddler yelling hi at a mailbox.

This is the part I carry into every single session I shoot, because I already get it, I know what it is to wait years for something everyone else gets to take for granted, and I know what it is to have that wait end in the most unglamorous, unposed, completely real moment possible, not a studio, not a countdown, not everyone looking at the camera on cue, just a real thing happening in real time and somebody lucky enough to be there to catch it.

That’s what I’m actually doing when I’m behind the camera with your family, I’m not chasing the perfect smile on command, I’m waiting for your version of hi, hi, hi, the unprompted one, the one that comes when nobody’s forcing it, and I’ve learned that it always comes if you just give it room to.

Some days that moment is loud and some days it’s so quiet you’d miss it if you were busy trying to get everyone to say cheese, but it’s there, both things can be true, the years of waiting and the ordinary Tuesday it finally shows up.

If you’re still waiting on your own version of hi, hi, hi, I’d love to walk alongside you while you do. Let’s talk about your family’s session, no pressure, no perfect smile required.