Nobody Throws a Shower for This (But We Should)
- 9 hours ago
- 3 min read
Updated: 48 minutes ago
When my marriage ended, I, like many divorcées, was presented with a conundrum regarding my wedding ring. I had recently redesigned the ring for our twentieth anniversary and still thought it was beautiful, but it represented too much history to continue wearing or giving to my kids, and too expensive to discard over a cliff with dramatic music. So… I dismantled it.
The ring became five stacking rings that I wear on different fingers. They catch the light when I reach for a wine glass, type on a keyboard, or grab a camera, and they make me smile in a way the original ring never quite managed to do.
I call them my liberation rings.
…Which got me thinking about the milestones we do not celebrate. Society has developed an elaborate ritual for engagements, weddings, babies, graduations, and retirements, involving invitations, gifts, speeches, photographs, and often cake. Yet many of life's most transformative chapters arrive without any formal acknowledgment at all.
Nobody throws a shower when a woman finally books the trip she has postponed for twenty years. There is rarely a registry for someone launching their own business after decades in a corporate career. Empty nesters do not receive congratulatory cards when they discover that a quiet house can be both heartbreaking and wonderful. Few people think to commemorate the moment they decide to date again, move across the country, learn a new language, come out, transition, retire, or simply become the best “them” they can be. And yet those moments can alter the course of a life just as profoundly as a wedding day.
Over the years, I have watched friends celebrate new beginnings in all sorts of ways. Some gather girlfriends and head to France. Some take up golf, painting, hiking, or ballroom dancing. Some buy a motorcycle, or get a passport, or buy a house. Some buy nothing at all and simply wake up one morning with a renewed sense of possibility.
Many eventually find themselves standing in front of a camera. Somewhere along the way, many decide they would like a record of who they have become, to use on their new website, a LinkedIn profile, a dating app, or the wall of a home office. The photographs are useful, certainly, but more importantly, they become evidence of a chapter that deserves to be remembered.
One of the things photography does particularly well is mark a moment in time. It allows us to look back and see not only how we looked, but how we felt: confident, uncertain, hopeful, brave, terrified, excited or usually some combination of all five.
While wedding photographs capture the anticipation of a promise, portraits commissioned later in life often capture something different. They acknowledge distance traveled, they celebrate resilience, reinvention, and the courage required to begin again.
My liberation rings remind me of that every day, not because they represent an ending, but because they remind me that some milestones are worth celebrating even when nobody sends invitations.
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Jody Holman is a Bay Area photographer specializing in inclusive, natural-light photography for weddings, proposals, families, and life events and celebrations across San Francisco, Napa, Sonoma, and the California coast.
