MOM AND ME
We look at mothers before they were mothers, or only just, and get their children to step into that frame in their mom’s life
Ihave always found photographs of my mother as a young woman compelling. Who is that person? So familiar, yet so different to the consuming presence that is my mother. Emphasis on “my”. Somehow our relationship is one of possession and an all- encompassing definition. She is a mother. The mother that is mine. An existence before the time she became mine and I became hers has a slippery quality. Things somehow getting away from us.
What did this woman who predates our relationship think? What did she aspire to? Who was she before she became my mother? How much of the person who existed in that fleeting snapshot of time past persists in the person she became? How much did the state of motherhood alter her personhood, or did it amplify and reinforce her being? She is a mystery. In looking at the woman who became my mother I am looking at versions of this woman and by extension versions of myself as reflected in the relationship.
A conversation at a party with a lawyer who described her newly empty nest was illustrative. She said that when she first had these now
absent children she was constantly caught off guard when they called her Mom. She kept on expecting her own mother to appear in response to the calls. Her own mother was “the mother”. She was still the child, albeit unexpectedly caught up in this new role.
Now time has done its trick — she responds to the label, but has been cast into a new reality. A post-motherhood. Or an otherhood. A recent film on Netflix played with this idea. If you are no longer a mother in the hands-on manner you have become accustomed to, what defines you? What is this otherhood? Who is this woman when she is not defined purely by her biological imperative? And by extension how have gender roles been redefined over the past few decades?
For Women’s Month we too played with otherhood. We borrowed photographs of mothers before they became mothers, or just as they entered the state of motherhood, then got their offspring to recreate the moment. We asked the subjects of these newly composed old portraits to grapple with these ideas, both with the benefit of hindsight and through the prism of time. It seems that by stepping into her frame we reimagine our own.