I’ve been thinking a lot about the women who came before me...
It usually begins with the scent of something familiar—a hand soap I only ever used at my grandmother’s house. Or the way my daughter brushes the hair from her face, just like I remember my mother doing. Or when I’m standing behind my camera and watching a grandmother cradle her daughter’s baby, and I suddenly feel like I’m watching time fold in on itself.
There’s a quiet truth I carry, especially this time of year:
We are not the first. We are not the last. But we are holding the line.
Motherhood didn’t start with me...
It didn’t even start with my own mother.
It began with women I will never know by name.
With bodies broken open so that life could continue.
With aching arms that held sick children through the night.
With garden hands and hard-working backs and hidden tears and hope—somehow, always hope.
I often wonder what my great-grandmothers would think of me...
Would they recognize me?
Would they see their own reflection in the way I hush a crying baby, or stir soup while bouncing a toddler on my hip?
Would they see the wild hope in my eyes—the same hope they once had?
I hope so.
I hope they’d say, “Yes, this is the same love. Different world, same love.”
Because it is.
And I feel it strongest in the quiet moments.
When my daughter rests her head on my chest.
When I catch my reflection holding one of my children and, for a second, I think it’s my mom.
When I photograph another woman mothering—and I see it again, that eternal thread.
That’s why I take pictures the way I do.
Not for the likes.
Not even for the now.
But for the then.
So one day, when my daughter’s daughter wonders what her great-grandmother looked like when she laughed—she’ll know.
When my son’s children ask what kind of mother I was—there will be proof.
Proof of the softness, the steadiness, the love.
When future generations sit around and pass albums back and forth, the thread will still be there, holding us.
This is why I believe in photographing motherhood.
Not in its perfection, but in its honesty.
Its sacred repetition.
Its inherited tenderness.
Its messy, resilient, and beautiful truth.
To my own mother, my grandmothers, my great-grandmothers—thank you.
You endured things I may never know.
And yet, because you did, I get to hold my children.
You are in all of this.
To the women around me now—
The ones raising babies and teens and hope in hard times—
I see you.
You are becoming someone’s history.
Someone’s deep, aching gratitude.
Someone’s story of how love never gave up.
This Mother’s Day, I’m celebrating the invisible thread.
The hands that held.
The hearts that broke and kept beating.
The women who came before, and the ones who will follow.
And I’m holding my camera a little closer.
Because this love deserves to be remembered.
This is what drives my work as a photographer—to freeze these moments for the generations who will one day call you “grandma” or “mom” or “that beautiful woman in the photo.
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