“Mum, I want to be a policeman,” she said with determination.

“Do you mean a policewoman?” I repeated.

“A police girl then. I am not a woman yet.”

“A police girl? Okey, but what happened to the pilot? You don’t want to be a pilot anymore?”

“No. One of the engines got broken.”

I hate when photographs flood my desktop. I would like them to belong somewhere as quickly as possible. I would like them to find their space, an owner or an accompaniment. They should know their space – just as a good student should know their sitting place in a classroom. Our daughter has just started school and she loves it partially because everything is so free-flowing at the moment for her and she can jump from station to station to explore the classroom. No one asks her to sit in one place. No one asks her to belong to a single location. She can honour her stage in development and explore. Trust and develop her instinct and intuition.

I suspect that my desktop files are at a different stage of development and they would benefit from more structure. I could arrange them better, arrange them according to their place of belonging, according to their chosen location. In the Beatrix Potter movie, there are many scenes in which Beatrix Potter talks to her illustrations as if she was trying to get to know them, to get a response from the work that she created. I suspect the same can be done with our photographic work. Which direction do you want to take? Where do you want to belong? Who do you think you belong to? Where does your gentleness reside? Where is your strength, your voice?

Sometimes we try so hard to protect our right to make our own choices that we stop making choices. The need to be untamed is stronger than reason or logic. It’s stronger than love at times.

After all we just want to be free but do we really? Perhaps not to the degree my files are on my desktop. I love watching the freedom of my kids. I love when they run and play and explore and scream. I love the safety that they they do it with under my watchful eye but at times my watchful eye gets tired with the different directions it has to take to keep them safe, to keep them unscathed and then I welcome the school routines, I welcome the quietness prompted and provoked by homework, I welcome the single-mindedness of the school uniforms. Life is a bit easier then, I think and my personal dilemma and internal conflict related to freedom for self-expression and the stifling aspects of routine life is somewhat resolved by the other ways in which liberation is afforded to me and them. A good degree of routine is necessary after all if one wants to become a police girl.

Aspirations require routines. I am terribly sad to admit this. In fact, I feel a degree of defeat almost as I write this, but it a joyful defeat. One that makes me and the kids smile.