Motherhood in Motion

There is a version of motherhood that looks like stillness. The rocking chair, the quiet house, the patience that people describe as a kind of grace. I have had moments of that. But mostly, motherhood for me has been motion — constant, generative, and occasionally disorienting motion.

This season, the motion took us to Mexico City.

I did not plan Mexico City as a departure from grief. I planned it as a commission, and then it became something else. Inside Luis Barragán's Casa Gilardi, with Azulu beside me and a camera in my hands, something shifted. The light in that building — the way it moves across the pink corridor in the late afternoon, the way Barragán understood that color is not decoration but atmosphere — felt like a language I had been trying to remember.

Motherhood, I have found, does not pause for beauty. It runs alongside it, sometimes uncomfortably close. I was taking photographs of a space that demanded a certain quality of attention, and at the same time I was watching Azulu discover that the water in the pool reflected the ceiling, that the yellow wall made the room feel warm, that architecture is something you can feel before you can name it. He was learning it the way children learn everything — through his body, without language, without effort.

I thought about that afterward. About how much of what I do as a documentarian is trying to get back to that state — to seeing something before I have organized it into what it is supposed to mean. Azulu doesn't have to try. He just looks.

Some seasons of motherhood feel loud. This one felt luminous. I don't know if that was Mexico City, or the light, or simply the particular stage we were in — the one where he is old enough to walk beside me but young enough to still reach for my hand in a new place. I know that the work I made there is some of the truest I've made. And I know that I could not have made it without him.

Motherhood in motion. Sometimes that is exactly what the work requires.