The Day I Stepped Back into My Texas

As I began journaling our everyday life, I realized something that startled me.

I have pages now, words about mornings and muddy boots and peanut butter hands and the way my boys climb into my lap without asking. I have paragraphs about holding this home together, about holding them, about holding myself.

But I didn’t have photographs.

Not real ones. Not the kind that say, we were here together. For the past four years I have either been pregnant or raising tiny humans. My body stretched and softened. My mind narrowed into survival. My energy went where it needed to go, into keeping everyone alive and fed and loved. Creativity felt like a luxury I could not afford. My creative brain turned off. Survival turned on. And I don’t regret that. But it changed me.

Recently, something has shifted. The fog is lifting. I can feel ideas again. I can feel beauty again. I can feel the part of me that notices light. Writing has become the doorway back. And as I wrote about the boys and our life here in Texas, it hit me: we have no photographs together. Not in three years. Not the kind you print. Not the kind you pass down. Not the kind that feel like memory before they even become memory.

A dear friend recommended a photographer she thought would understand us. His name is Eric Cain, a western lifestyle photographer who shoots both film and digital. I didn’t fully understand what she meant until after our day together. There was something steady about him. Observant. Unhurried. He wasn’t trying to manufacture a moment. He was waiting for it. He let the wind move. He let the boys run. He let me settle into myself instead of posing as someone I am not.

Afterward, I went home and dove into his work. I studied it from every angle I could find. I studied the way he frames a fence line. The way he catches dust rising behind a horse. The way Texas light sits on skin at the end of the day. And when I ran out of photographs to look at, I felt something I haven’t felt in a long time. I wanted more. That wanting surprised me. That doesn’t happen often for me. I know a lot of photographers. Some of them are my closest friends. Their work speaks to me. But it had been a long time since a stranger’s work stopped me in that quiet way.

What struck me most was not simply his eye, but his ability to photograph Texas. It was his Texas. Not the loud version. Not the cliché. But the feeling of it. I grew up coming to Texas for horse shows, three major ones, year after year. I loved it before I ever lived here. I loved the heat. The early mornings working horses. The smell of the barns. Riding until my whole body ached. Meeting good, grounded people. Sitting on the back of trucks watching ropings at dusk. Dancing to live music. Sweat and humidity and dust and laughter that wrapped around you like a second skin. It was a very specific feeling. And somewhere along the way, I misplaced it. Not because I had children. I know that for a fact. But because life shifted. Because survival took over. Because love got practical and busy and tired. I didn’t even realize how much I missed that feeling until I met Eric. It was as if I needed someone else to show it back to me.

That day, while I was stepping back into something familiar, something that felt like the Texas I fell in love with, he was quietly capturing it.

He captured the way I look at my boys.
He captured their tiny cowboy hats and dusty boots.
He captured the old house we are slowly turning into a home.
The pastures. The trees. The light.

He captured the love story I didn’t realize I was still living.

And somehow, in the middle of documenting us, he handed me something back.

My Texas.
My creative self.
My place in the frame.

For the first time in years, I don’t just have words about our life.

I have proof that I am in it.