A New Book Looks At Our Mothers Before They Were Mothers
Written by Erin Feher
Photography by Photo Courtesy of Mothers Before
In 2015, The New York Times best-selling author Edan Lepucki published a novel called Woman No. 17. The plot revolved around mother-daughter relationships, so to promote the book, she created an Instagram account that invited women and nonbinary people to share photos of their mothers before they became mothers. “Their captions, just a couple of sentences long, would tell us about their mom: about the image of her, or about what’s occurred in the decades since the shutter opened, then closed. They would tell us how they felt about their mother,” writes Lepucki. “The project, I hoped, would offer glimpses of this most seminal relationship, whether it be easy or fraught or beautiful or damaged or intimate or distant or all of that at once.”
As goes the origin story of so many pieces of viral online phenomena, Edan didn’t really expect too much from the account, which she called Mothers Before. But it resonated, and the account now has more than 76,000 followers, and nearly 700 submitted posts from around the world. Now it also has its very own book, Mothers Before: Stories and Portraits of Our Mothers as We Never Saw Them, which comes out tomorrow (April 7, 2020 by Abrams Image).
“Between the covers of this book are images of elegance, gumption, innocence, knowingness, frailty, naïveté, willfulness, beauty, strength, resilience, vulnerability, triumph—and more.” writes Lepucki in the intro. “What came into focus for me as I read the pieces that accompanied these images was how much work it takes to connect with our mothers before. It takes respect and compassion to consider the woman we will never get to know and to try and square her with the woman we do know, and to accept that not all the discrepancies will be resolved. For some of the contributors, their experience of reading their mothers is a celebration. For others, it’s a reckoning. Either way, it’s work. It’s an effort of love.”
Click through the slideshow below for an excerpt from the forthcoming book Mothers Before: Stories and Portraits of Our Mothers as We Never Saw Them, collected and edited by Edan Lepucki.
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- "This photograph was taken in Kenya when my mother was probably twenty or twenty-one. She’s the one in white. I have always loved this photo. Her demeanor, cool and collected, looking far out in the distance. Her clothing. That subtle cross of her feet. The bottle of Coca-Cola in her hand. It’s hard to believe my mother, or any of our mothers, really, had lives before they had us. How strange..." -Vallerie Mwazo in Mothers Before.
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- "My mother, Moi Ling, was born in Malaysia in 1960, the second of eight children. When we’re in Malaysia visiting her family, she reverts to her most instinctual self: talking loudly in Teochew, their dialect. There is no shortage of opinions, and they come at a deafening and relentless clip. In America, where she and my father immigrated to with my younger brother and me when we were one and two, respectively, life was quieter and harder. While my father struggled to find a job, my mother took on odd hustles where she could: waitressing and sewing stuffed animals. She knew only the basics of sewing; she’d never waitressed before and didn’t know the names of common cocktails because she didn’t drink herself. She said yes to tasks she didn’t fully understand and somehow managed to pull them off. I didn’t know the name for it when I was younger, but now I realize what it was: charm. My mother was and is charming, and that charm, coupled with a determination bordering on stubbornness, went a long way. Our younger selves couldn’t have been more different. As a child, I must have puzzled her. I was an indoor kid who couldn’t be pulled away from books. I dreaded running our weekly miles at school; even a lap was hard. My mother, though, excelled at all things athletic. She was a track and field star, especially good at the long jump. She was excellent at badminton. But the thing at which she was truly skilled was ping-pong. She had a mean smash. She was one of the two girls admitted to her math and science junior high; she was so good at ping-pong they wanted her on the school team. I love this photo of her, mid-smash, the rest of her life before her still. She’d approach it with this spirit intact." -Rachel Khong in Mothers Before.
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- "Here is my mother, Susan, working as a copyboy at the Chicago Tribune in the early 1970s. At that time, women were scarce in newsrooms, hence the job title. She had to promise in her interview that she wouldn’t cry at work! Indeed, she didn’t, and continued to work in journalism for the next thirty years. The picture was taken by my father. The Tribune was where they met." -Kate Crum in Mothers Before.
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"Very early in life, I realized my mother was different from other mothers. She is a hurricane of emotions: when she’s ecstatic, her laughter bellows, spilling into the rest of the house. It’s the same with her screams when she’s upset. My mother is complicated and misunderstood, whimsical and spirited. It simply depends on the day, sometimes the hour. Throughout it all, fashion is her excuse or her cure: a dangly earring, a gold bracelet, that perfect scarf to tie an outfit together. A pair of elegant eyeglasses gives her a reason to face the day.
Before I came along, the year was 1979, and my mother had become a plus-size model for a spell. She was modeling fur in a studio in San Francisco. Her perfect Afro frames her face, her lips that memorable red I’d come to know throughout childhood. My mom was the only black woman I knew who could rock this red—and she still wears it today. In this photo she looks grand, special, and regal. A woman on the go, to be seen, with places to be. Very married but still available to dream. I’ve seen this photo many times, but it’s only now that I realize how close my mother was to having a different destiny. Becoming a mother changed all that."
"I’m a new wife myself, and I recognize now how fast one’s dreams can evaporate if you commit to motherhood above all else, even above your passions. That’s what my mom did. It’s why I’m struggling with the idea of parenthood for myself. I don’t know how and when to suspend my ambition, and I’m not strong enough to think about it. I’ve watched my mother’s career dwindle with every decade. I always wondered if the struggle between us stems from hope lost. She decided to put her dreams to the side to have me, and then my sister. The ultimate sacrifice. I’ve accepted my mother as human; she was whole, even before she gave birth to me. I’ve committed to absorbing her dreams and hopes. I’ve taken on the struggle for her, to create a reality that she never thought possible. I want to dock my mother’s intensity at a safe port in a storm, in perfect weather. I want her to walk in fashion, in vogue, confidently, captivating the world with her grace, magnetism, and heart. It took me 39 years to realize she’s the love of my life and the one I have always been looking for. She built the ship that I sail." -Wynter Mitchell-Rohrbaugh in Mothers Before.
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"She was good, maybe even great, at making the best of things. She made sure to teach my sister and me to enjoy life’s pleasures: hot coffee, good art, a well-made martini, conversation, and a story. She was charming. People thought she was better educated and better traveled than she was. She was fun to be with. But she was also furious, the way so many women of her place and time were. It was a rage that was under the surface, that erupted when she was challenged or crossed. It was shocking, or at least it
shocked me. She knew how to wound, and she never apologized. She didn’t believe in it. It makes me sad to write this. She never got along with her mother, and she wanted us to be close, but that unnamed, unnamable anger was always in the way. I adored her, but in the same way she was always a little angry, I was always a little afraid. I have another picture of her, at 92 or 93, looking at an enlargement of this picture and laughing. Her long white hair is braided, and she is still beautiful. Charming. Funny. Delightful. But never entirely knowable to the people—my stepfather, my sister, and I—who loved her. She was pleased that my husband had made this gift for her but not surprised. She knew her power. In the black-and-white picture she is holding, the one she turned to, to be reminded of who she was, she is independent and sure of herself. In it, she looks back at the camera and my father boldly, a dark-eyed young woman who knows who she is and where she is. Who has her secrets and who will always believe it is better not to tell."
-Darcy Vebber in Mothers Before.
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- Get your own copy of Mothers Before: Stories and Portraits of Our Mothers as We Never Saw Them right here.
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