In October 2018, a year after moving into a static caravan to save money for a house, I gave birth to our son. This work, which I have been making the past two years, explores my experience of early motherhood whilst living in this space.
I thought it would feel magical, but it doesn’t. It’s blood and sweat and sick and milk and poo. It’s primal, it’s gross. When he has a cold I have to suck snot from his nose so he can breathe. I wake in the morning in a puddle of my own milk, when he cries the pull to care for him feels like a cheese grater dragging through my insides. It’s suffocating. Tears come most days. But as I get to know him, the love I feel is like no other and slowly, I’m starting to get to know myself again.
The images I was so accustomed to seeing of family life, didn’t depict any of this. So I began to make my own, to make sense of this new world. In the 70’s Jo Spence and Rosy Martin wrote:
“Family snaps, hardly give any indication of the contradictions, power struggles or desires inherent at all levels of family life, or in the intersection of that life with the structures which make up a patriarchal society with sexual, racial and class divisions.”
50 years on, I feel this to be true. It’s hard to share these images. I don’t like how I look in them, I don’t want my son to see this version of his mother. But I am so tired of the standard parents are still expected to live up to.
The caravan sits in a wild parcel of land, the oak tree stan
