Both the images here and the statement below are a work in progress. If you click on an image it will open larger on a separate page.
A Unique Motherhood tells the story of raising my daughter, who my husband and I adopted from foster care. Survivors ourselves, we were taken with the romance of healing someone who had been traumatized before we met her. We aimed to create a place for this unique soul to take root, and perhaps imagined ourselves more prepared than we were.
In A Unique Motherhood, I explore two decades of mothering through metaphorical images, presented as faded family photographs. The images take up abandonment and attachment, wild creativity and chaos, disorientation and exhaustion—not to mention my own early childhood issues. They portray the daily search for something precious and beautiful amidst the thicket of symptoms we couldn’t decipher. As the years go by, tangles of anxiety take hold and other birds fly off to their destinies. Despite all, my small person grows to a unique adulthood; even after the loss of a family member, the surviving duo limps together into the future.