This is what happens when you give a girl a baby and tell her it’s a blessing. I was 17 when I became a mother. By 38, I had birthed five sons, scattered the ashes of one, and become a grandmother. These photos began without a plan; just images taken in the cracks of mothering: between feedings, between fights, between police visits and school reports, between griefs I had no name for.
Some are staged. Some stolen. Some beautiful in the wrong way. They’re not portraits. They’re hauntings. A feral archive of boyhood and becoming. Of sweetness turning sour. Of soft things with sharp teeth.
Medea Rising is not a reference, it’s a warning. The mother as monster, as mirror, as myth. The one who sees too much and is punished for it. These images live in that space: half love letter, half elegy. Evidence of what it costs to hold, to witness, to raise, to let go.
This isn’t nostalgia. It’s survival with dirt under its fingernails.
