I’m reflecting on how home is an act of molding a space into an ideal.
My concept of home has evolved from a place of fear and exclusion to one of safety and acceptance. In creating a new domestic space, like many parents, I sought to redefine what it means to create a home and what the concept of home has meant to me. This journey towards co-creating a domestic space to raise a child is marked by intentionality, radical acceptance, and the continuous effort to redefine family and faith in a queer context. The concept of queer households existing as a “third space” within neighborhoods has been central to our approach to creating a home where love, autonomy, and reciprocity are paramount. As two queer moms raising a white boy, our desire and act of queering the space is intentional in counteracting heteronormativity and patriarchal systems.
I’m considering how my mental health was shaped during the earliest years of my life in my childhood home and by my religious upbringing.
The memories of my abuse contribute to my need to interrogate everyone’s motives, my ability to recognize and accept love, my ability to trust, my body/mind’s fear of eternal damnation, and my struggle to believe that I am worth anything. These beliefs were ingrained in me for over twenty-five years, and the path to healing is ongoing. The latent impact of physical and religious trauma reverberates in inconvenient moments. In my dreams, my body winces, the present melds with the past, and the past invades the present. How do I create a space of safety when it is something I do not think I have ever known?
I’m contemplating how I document my family’s visual narrative of our life together and the connection between memory, place, and photographic images.
Kodak solidified the collective consciousness’s adoption of the idea that images exist as pathways to remember critical moments of life. [Kodak marketing quote] Our memories are shaped and reinforced by the images we see. Documentation of family life is more accessible than ever. While the printed photo albums of disposable cameras from my childhood were stored and shared infrequently, the scroll of my phone’s photo album acts as a mnemonic device replaying memories rapidly, searing them into a family’s collective memory of time and place.
I’m considering the utility and application of the smartphone camera on a technical level.
Using the smartphone to capture “moments” in the space my family occupies and calls home, I look for moments of magic and wonder. Embracing the mistakes, the blurs, and snapshots alongside the critically aligned imagery is a nod to the imperfect nature of the family vacation aesthetic and the observation of the magic in how light moves through the space and around its inhabitants.
In these small acts of looking—through the lens, through memory, through the rhythms of daily life—I return again and again to the question of what makes a home. Not just for myself, but for those I love. Perhaps it’s not a place we find, but one we learn to shape, frame by frame, into something that holds us.