Mother Maker, Memory Keeper

On constantly creating and recreating in motherhood and language – with a nod to the brilliant work of photographer Annie Wang

This is not me but it totally could be, especially with my shiny new disposable film camera I recently bought. By Joshua Tsu via Unsplash

At last count, I have over 65,000 photos on my phone, more than two dozen photo albums on my bookshelf, 20 photo books, with three more in the online project folder, and more photo boxes filled with loose photos than I know what to do with. Last week, good-old Apple let me know it will be increasing my monthly iCloud storage payment. When I tried to downgrade to a cheaper plan with less storage, I got so overwhelmed trying to go through photos, I gave up. And yet, and especially after a holiday, I still worry I haven’t taken enough photos of my kids, made enough photo books, captured enough memories, documented enough of our life.¹

Just as I did as a child in front of my father’s lens, my children oscillate between annoyance and acceptance when I pull out my phone, my big camera or more recently, a disposable one with film. “My mom takes too many photos,” my son recently told his Spanish teacher when she asked about our recent trip. During our holiday last week, I kept thinking about mothers as keepers of memories. (I loved this take on mothers and memory keeping by

Sara Petersen

In Pursuit of Clean Countertops

on the bullshit of feeling guilty about empty baby books, btw.)

Growing up, it was actually my father who did the memory-keeping work of taking photos, getting them developed (80s/90s for the win), making albums. He was also the one who mailed envelopes filled with photos to grandparents back in Poland. He was not only the memory keeper but a curator of intergenerational relationships in a time when there was no e-mail, no Whatsapp family group, no private Instagram accounts for family to see kid photos.

With my kids, I am the one who takes too many photos. Unlike many moms who realize at some point they are never in their photos, I am in plenty of them. I take selfies with the kids, precarious self-timer photos of the four of us, and my partner is good about taking photos of the three of us. But after the photo is snapped, I am the one who keeps it, who feels its heavy — emotional and financial — weight, not only in my phone (thank you Apple for the price increase) but in my mind. I hear it calling in the middle of the night, “What will you do with these perfect 1,000 images now?”

My daughter’s six-month-old little legs and adorable sandy toes on the beach in 2017.

The same child’s six-year-old legs and sandy toes on the same beach last week.

There are so many (poetic) parallels here with my research on how mothers are so often keepers of a heritage language, even when that language is not their own². Mothers predominantly bear the burden of keeping heritage languages alive in the home against so many odds: school, society, peer groups, sometimes partners, and above all, the community language. Cultural memory adds another complex layer to heritage language maintenance and transmission, as it does in memory keeping through photographs. What and how do you remember? Whose memories? Whose heritage language?

This topic, or rather the notion of mothers as keepers of language and memories,  is not new for me. I have been thinking about, and researching the language part, for years. Every time I make a photo book, I consider how I am trying to create, or influence something, especially around how my children will remember their childhoods. When I insist they speak Polish, yes, it is to foster bilingualism, but that too is about influencing something. I also know that in the end, it is all mostly beyond my control.

But what surprised me the most this time, during our trip, was my immeasurable desire and need to recreate moments and memories. I was not only a keeper of memories but a keeper of time and space. As I wrote here, this was not our first time where we were on holiday and it is a small enough island you can do the things and see the places you’ve been to before, even multiple times on a one-week trip.

While we were visiting the same towns and beaches as years before, I couldn’t move beyond this visceral need to document our family in the same places as last year, and ideally, the year before. I didn’t go as far as asking my children to assume the same pose, but I did consider it. It is as if I craved layer upon layer of reminders, evidence, reinforcement. Of what? I don’t know. Of time passing? Of a place staying the same while my children change and grow? Predictably after the photo was taken, I would look at last year’s photo, or one from the time before, and on cue, say something like, “Look how much you’ve grown.” Insufferable mother who takes too many photos.

As I noted here, while considering all this, I kept thinking of the photographer and artist Annie Wang and her compelling work, Mother as Creator. In 2001, Wang took a self-portrait of herself pregnant. The following year, she took a photo of her with her baby son, an image of the previous photo hanging behind them. She continued this for more than 20 years: posing with her son, photo within a photo, within a photo within a photo, of all the previous images on display. A “time-tunnel”, Wang called it in an interview with The New Yorker. The same article notes there were a few gaps throughout the years when Wang did not take a yearly photograph, for a variety of reasons. That in itself is a nod to maternal memory and time – you know, the days are long but the years are short.

Annie Wang, 2003.

Annie Wang, 2018.

A collection of some of Wang’s images from Mother as Creator, year after year.

I don’t think I will compare the photos I’ve taken from this trip with years before side by side (never say never) but I find great comfort in the idea of a “time-tunnel”. I spend a considerable amount of time wandering in an often suffocating dark place like this, consumed with worries about time passing too quickly, for heritage language transmission, and in life. But the great thing about tunnels is eventually, for better or for worse, you get to the other side and re-emerge or, at least come up for air.

Thank you for reading.

You thought I was done but here I am, throwing in one more photo because it made me think: My god, what will my children, or grandchildren, do with all the photos, albums and photo books I have? Right now, they do love looking at old photos but eventually, will they end up in a box for sale for 50p on Portobello Road? Photo by Roman Kraft via Unsplash

1. Don’t let this for a second make you think you need to be doing the same. This is my own bullshit I need to deal with.

2. See, “Invisible Work” by Toshie Okita, for example.