mapping motherhood

a cartography of care

How do you map motherhood, a path so littered with wreckage?

Broken bones and broken egos, broken heirlooms and broken breasts.

How do you map a path marked by boundarylessness? There exist no lines around this kind of love, no preparation for this kind of sacrifice, no limit for this kind of fidelity, no prescription for this kind of exhaustion.

Perhaps this is why most mothers rarely attempt to map our experience; perhaps it's why most of us live day to day without marking time or place, without creating larger rituals out of the dozens of tiny ones we move through every hour. Perhaps it’s why we become the women in the grocery store looking longingly at the mother and her son, murmuring to the stranger in aisle 3 about how fast it will all go.

“Sibling Se[nt|d]iments” by Catherine Reinhart / Sculpture: plexi glass pillars, dirty socks, fiber and thread remnants, sheets, Various Heights, 2022.