1401341462 (N) by Caitlin Shetterly

Author:Caitlin Shetterly
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

On January 21 Dan went to his first day of work since the middle of December—it was a $200 job. That night, an assistant job he had booked for the next full week, which would have made us $1,500, was pushed back once more. The next day it was canceled.

By this point, we were hungover with exhaustion, as any new parents are, but there was an insidious malaise that had started to permeate every waking and sleeping moment—it took up every inch of available breath and got hold of our lives. Dan told me how people he knew were losing work left, right and center. The photography business, he said, depends on advertising budgets. As magazines went under and catalogue companies went in-house to try to stop the hemorrhage of bloated ad campaigns, the trickle-down effect hit us. And because we were freelancers, we weren’t eligible for unemployment.

On January 23, the only job Dan had booked for February was canceled. I remember when he got the call: I was holding two-week-old Matthew, who was sleeping on my shoulder, and standing in the middle of our tiny apartment, my heart racing. I was stunned. “This is really bad, Cait,” was all Dan said. And then he started making us dinner. “Want me to do that?” I offered.

“No, let me do it. I need to do something.”

That night I looked around our apartment, trying to figure out what we could sell if we had to: Camera gear? Our one laptop? I turned to Dan and said, “I think the only thing we have that’s worth anything is my more-than-abundant breast milk. Should we try to sell that?” It was a crazy-making moment, trying to find something, anything, that would save us.

“Cait,” Dan said, “our son needs that milk. That’s a last resort.” In the end, later, when we were about to cross the country again, I gave my frozen breast milk to a woman with an adopted baby. Selling it, when I saw so much need posted all over the mommy Web communities I belonged to, just felt wrong.

The next day Dan started calling every photographer he knew in Los Angeles and on the East Coast. He told everyone that he was willing to be anyone’s assistant or anyone’s assistant’s assistant, he didn’t care. He needed a job. Call after call people told him they didn’t have anything, that they, too, were having hard times. He called every client he’d ever worked with, and everyone said the same thing: “Advertising budgets are getting slashed. We’re going in-house. People are getting laid off.” Back in November, when Dan had been home in Maine shooting freelance for his old company, they were on the brink of scoring a couple of new clients and had told him that they thought they could offer him his old job again for slightly more than he was paid before they put him to part-time and we went west. Dan came back to L.A. and, even though it

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