Motherhood

In 2025, I photographed my mother when we returned, after many years, to her childhood home. The house stands hundreds of kilometers away from the life she now inhabits. Her parents have long been gone. The home they left behind remained empty, as their children and grandchildren live across Estonia and abroad. Time has settled into the rooms. The floors no longer carry weight. Objects lie scattered and still, traces of a life that once unfolded there. My mother’s childhood in this house was not easy. In its dim, fragile interior, something in her posture shifted. Sadness seemed to surface quietly, as if the walls themselves were remembering. In a drawer in the living room we found old letters, brittle with age. Among them was a telegram my mother once sent to my grandmother, announcing that a daughter had been born. Me.