“My little love I see your eyes widen like an ocean. When you look at me so full of my emotions.” -Adele

I had had this song on repeat, My Little Love by Adele, before I scheduled this session with Jessica. Music and lyrics like this have a way of transporting me back to different times in my life, this one in particular, to my own experiences being a mom. I’m aware songs and their lyrics have meanings apart from how I interpret them. But I find this is the beauty of art, the viewer and the listener, gets to interpret it and experience it in a way that is unique to them and their experiences absorbing that art and can usually do this apart from the original author’s actual intent. Art is powerful in this way.

“I’m finding it hard to be here sincerely.”

“I don’t recognize myself in the coldness of the daylight.”

“I’m so far gone and you’re the only one who can save me.”

“I’m holding on, barely.”

“Momma’s got a lot to learn, teach me.”

“When you lay on me can you feel the way my heart breaks?”

“I wanted you to have everything I never had.”

I have felt each and every one of those lyrics quoted above. There’s something about the polar extremes of emotions that I feel being a mother, sometimes moment by moment, others from one breath to the next. Music and lyrics like this feels much like the imagery I create. It identifies and calls out the truths of emotional highs and the lows of parenting, much in the same way in which I view light and shadow in my images as they represent this reality. So many big waves of overwhelming love and joy in parenting my children and simultaneously the many big waves of emotional exhaustion and pain of loneliness I experienced as well. It’s impossible for me to hear this song and not get a lump in my throat.

When the yin and yang of those emotional highs and lows of parenting are so inextricably linked, I want to create art that addresses that reality visually and experientially. I want to capture visually, the highs of connection and overwhelming feelings of love for your child, while giving a nod to the lows, the shadows visually if you will.

When my kids were still little I was just getting into Self Portraiture. The images I created of me with my children while practicing Self Portraiture are priceless beyond words. There is literally no way for me to accurately describe how meaningful they are to me as a reminder of how precious those moments were. And since we cannot go back in time, only forward, I am additionally extremely grateful that I had the presence of mind to push through all of the stress and the exhaustion I also felt while raising my kids at those young ages in order to create them.

Experientially, one of my main goals for Mommy + Me sessions is to provide a comfortable space for women to feel at ease and the most themselves while creating the base images so that when they remember the art pieces we created there is a beautiful visual association and also a pleasant memory associated with her time with me and the creation of that art piece.

You can’t go back and do something that you wish you would’ve done, you can only choose today to invest in preserving those moments that you will never be able to get back. Now is the time to capture those moments since time only moves forward. Among the list of things you will never regret, I would add my own experience and what I try and remind myself of daily, “Your future self will never regret the images you choose to create today.”

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