An octopus has three hearts

An octopus has three hearts

I created this series while pregnant and after giving birth to my first child. “Discovering an octopus has three hearts,” I think, is significant in terms of the theme of this series; becoming a mother challenges you to grow extra hearts which can feel deeply profound and very frightening at the same time. After the Octopus gives birth, she dies. And so this also reflects what we go through after giving birth, we literally have to “die” in order to give birth to our new selves as mothers. I also explored how the mother-child relationship changed over time, with images of a mother and her young adult daughter. Even though her daughter is a young adult, she will always be her “baby”. Mothers never stop worrying about their children. Even though the umbilical cord has long been cut, there’s this invisible cord that deeply connects us to our children. We feel their pain, their joy, they are in our cells. Furthermore in the study “waxing and waining” I photographed a mother on her own expressing the intense emotions that accompany motherhood.
Some of the images also speak of my experience of pregnancy loss. It is so much a part of this journey for so many women in the throes of motherhood and too often gets swept under the carpet because it is difficult to deal with. The two studies I included which express this are titled “lost in silence” and “still life”. I have suffered several miscarriages but the most traumatic one was referred to as a “silent miscarriage” and I only found out via a sonogram that the baby was not viable. The reference to the word “silence” in the title also links to the fact that during pregnancy women are encouraged not to announce their pregnancies until 12 weeks because most miscarriages occur before then. There is a sense of shame surrounding miscarriage and I feel strongly that this resulting silence must be broken. “Still life” also speaks of the cold reactions that I received from some people when I shared with them that I had had a miscarriage, things were said like: “it was only a few cells” or “you can always try again”. These reactions devalue the life you’ve carried inside of you, and silence the grief that you may be yearning to share. 
© 2023 Stefanie Langenhoven. All rights reserved.