In my hands I hold
the evidence of a day
come and gone.
Week by week they fill
with replacements for what I wish
I could but cannot keep.
Every lullaby, every bedtime story
is a whispered goodbye
to the child they were.
So I keep the little lock of hair,
the picked flower, the birthday candle —
because I cannot keep the little one
who by morning is already someone new.
One of my sons has learned that things continue to exist when he can’t see them. The other is still finding that out. I am learning the opposite.
Object Impermanence is a series of cyanotype photograms made from objects I have kept through the first years of motherhood: the hospital bands from the days they were born, locks of hair from their first haircuts, the first flower my eldest picked for me. Most of early motherhood leaves no record. What I do have is a drawer of relics, proof that a particular week existed.
I place each object on paper coated with light-sensitive iron salts and leave it in the sun. What comes back is the object in white, and deep blue everywhere else. A photogram is not a picture of a thing, but a record of contact. Nothing is depicted; something is registered. Mothering feels the same. We leave impressions on each other, traces of experience and time. But having the evidence is not having the thing. The cyanotype process asks the same of me that these years do: hold still, stay close, while you can.