the beginning of everything

These images started with a question: AM I READY TO BE A MOTHER?

As an outsider to this world, I set out to understand the indefinable connection between mother and child and how it is expressed through both physical and emotional intimacy. I have always been drawn to the unique nature of touch, and a mother’s touch might indeed be the most intimate interaction we experience, unmatched by any other relationship except perhaps that of a trusted lover.

I am not a mother myself but always assumed I would know when it was time. Surely an alarm would sound to signal I was ready to crawl into my chrysalis and emerge a different, selfless woman ready to set aside my personal time, my goals, my body. I am at a point in my life where I have to choose, and it is with wonder and curiosity that I entered these homes and experienced a fragment of these women’s lives and was left to witness and contemplate the intensity of this connection firsthand. A connection that words can not describe, and every movie I’ve seen can only hint at. The outside world does not exist in these photos, it is the world of a new mother, a metamorphosis from singular to plural, a division of self where less equals more.

Some of these women are my dearest friends, and some are strangers I met on the street, and although they differ in age, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and experience, they are united and seen as Mother.

The result is a series of images that explore the weight of that intimacy, their connection, and their responsibility to one another as mother and child embrace, clinging to each other knowing they are made from one and the same and will one day have to separate.

// Megan Kitts, 2023