Some moments are spontaneous.
Others are gently arranged — not to make them something they aren’t, but to make sure they’re remembered.
We were in his room — a familiar, everyday space. I wanted to document it with care. Him walking away. Walking back toward me. Reaching out with whatever he happened to be holding. Moments paused long enough to be noticed. Memories distilled into lines.
Illustration allows me to keep what mattered — not to recreate the past, but to honor the growth within it.
He was just over a year old. Only by a few days.
I had noticed how much stronger he had become. How comfortable he was moving on his own. So I asked my husband to take photos of us together — interacting the way we always do. I wanted to capture this stage clearly, knowing how quickly it passes.
From that set of images, one stayed with me.
He’s standing in front of me, handing me a wooden block. A small, ordinary exchange — and yet it held so much of who he was becoming, and who I was becoming alongside him.
When I returned to the image, I illustrated the moment the way I always do — reducing it to its essentials: gesture, proximity, connection. The flowers beneath us represent growth — quiet, steady, unfolding — a visual way of holding the season we were in.
These illustrated stories are artifacts of my life. They are fragments of motherhood.
Photography shows me what happened.
This piece holds the memory of him learning to walk — and me learning how fleeting these early days are. How even the moments we carefully document eventually become something we reach for later.
This is the work I return to.
Not to recreate the past,
but to hold what it taught me.
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