Musings On Motherhood: The Last Time I Carried My Child

 

My 22-year-old son said something to me not long ago that stopped me in my tracks.


He is not one to be overly sentimental; he lives half a world away from us now, and I don’t think he has told me he loves me since he was 9 (as his mom, I know what that means, and what it doesn’t mean). I can’t get what he said to me out of my mind, because I missed it. And it’s haunting me.

He asked me casually the last time I was with him if I remembered the last time I picked him up, carried him in my arms? ‘You know mom, there was a last time. The last and final time you ever picked me up. Do you remember when it was? Think about it. For every parent, there is a last time that they pick up their kids and carry them.’ Wow.

The thought stunned me. It’s true of course, and of course I have absolutely no idea when it happened. Where were we? What country were we in? What had happened? Was he sad? Hurt? Crying? Scared? Angry? Or was he sleepy or playing around? How heavy was he? How old was he? What did he look like at that time? What had we been doing? Was anyone else there? It was the last time I ever picked him up. It never crossed my mind to pay attention to that moment, now lost, because at the time I never would have expected it to be important, for it to be the last time.

If I had known, if it happened after the advent of the ubiquitous, ever-present smart phone, I would have tried to capture it with a photo I suppose, although how I would do that while carrying a fairly large boy raises some creative questions. Maybe I would have tried to balance him on one hip, with one arm, while fumbling for my phone to take a selfie. Maybe I would have posted it on Facebook or Instagram “The last time I ever picked up Zack… LOL”  Cringe. The understanding of what that last time meant, what it means now, catches in my throat and blurs my eyes. The recognition makes my heart hurt, makes me pine for my little boy, the child I used to carry around and comfort and parent.

But it must be said, that while I am stunned that something so seminal in my life passed so unnoticed, on balance I feel GRATEFUL that I didn’t know. I am retrospectively, privately grateful that I didn’t scramble to immortalize that moment, to document it, capture it, to share it. We were both unaware that we were present to a very poignant and important moment in our lives together. Neither of us remember it, but we both know absolutely that it happened, that it was an authentic occurrence in our relationship, a rite of passage that slipped past quietly. The real event that we can only now imagine conjures instant, strong emotion without a single tangible visual.

We have left just the inarguable certainty that it happened, and that seems more than enough.

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Martha Chaudhry

Martha’s portrait photographs and family art commissions have won accolades and multiple awards. Twenty years a commercial photographer in the Asia Pacific, her contemporary approach to business and family photography is rooted in storytelling and sought by clients throughout the region. As an artist, Martha’s raw material is mined from the existing global archive of images. Her most recent work explores the 1896 early photographs that illustrate the first edition of the International Cloud Atlas. Martha combines her skills in photography and fine art practice to create custom works of family fine art for clients incorporating their own photographic archives meaninfully into the work. Beyond family portraiture, these pieces interweave the journeys and vital stories of families or business entities, resulting in showpieces of deeply meaningful and personal nature. On these commissioned works, Martha collaborates with others in the creative industry on design and installation, to ensure a gallery-worthy art piece that assumes pride of place in a home or office. Martha holds a Master of Fine Arts (MAFA) from LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore (Goldsmith’s London), holds licentiate qualifications with the Master Photographer’s Association (MPA) in the U.K., and trained as a photographer in the US, UK, Canada, Spain and Singapore. Her studio Martha Chaudhry Photography was founded in 1997. Martha has participated in many group exhibitions in Singapore, China and Hong Kong over the past twenty years. Martha believes her talents and work can be harnessed to assist others, and bring awareness to issues of social justice. Over the years she has used her professional skills to accomplish deep work in Cambodia in particular, as well as Singapore and Pakistan. In 2011 Martha was featured in Channel NewsAsia’s documentary series Asia Exposed 2, where her portrait and storytelling skills were employed to draw attention to the travesty of child sex trafficking in southeast Asia.

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