The Woman Who Knew You First
Before you knew yourself, your mother knew you.
She knew the weight of you before you could stand.
The sound of your cry.
The way you slept.
The face you made when you were hungry, tired, cross, frightened or delighted.
She knew which knee you scraped.
Which tooth came out first.
What you looked like before you cared what you looked like.
For a long time, knowing went mostly one way.
You knew her as Mum.
The person who found things.
Remembered things.
Drove you places.
Said no.
Said yes when Dad had already said no.
Waited up.
Worried.
Embarrassed you.
Knew when something was wrong before you had said a word.
When we are children, I don't think it occurs to us that our mothers had lives before us.
That they had faces we never knew.
Bodies that had not carried us.
Friends we have never met.
Clothes they loved.
Bad haircuts.
People who broke their hearts.
Plans that had nothing to do with becoming somebody's mother.
We know them first by what they are to us.
And then, if we are lucky, something begins to change.
We grow up.
We sit across a table from them and hear a story we have never heard before.
We ask a question we wouldn't have thought to ask at twenty.
We recognise an expression in the mirror and realise it belongs to her too.
Perhaps we become mothers ourselves and suddenly understand things we couldn't have understood before.
Or perhaps we don't.
But somewhere along the way, we begin to see the woman.
Not only the mother.
I think that is one of the strange gifts of growing older.
Your mother becomes a person.
And at exactly the same time, you begin to understand that she is growing older too.
The woman who once seemed permanent is changing.
So are you.
The hands are different.
The face is different.
The balance between you shifts.
A daughter who once reached upwards may now be the taller one.
A mother who once did the holding may, eventually, be the one who leans in.
And still, something remains instantly recognisable.
I see it when I photograph mothers and daughters.
Sometimes it is resemblance.
The same eyes.
The same hands.
The same tilt of the head.
Sometimes they look nothing alike.
But then one laughs and the other follows.
One reaches for the other without thinking.
A hand lands on an arm in a way it has probably landed there a thousand times before.
Those are the things I watch for.
Not because every mother and daughter relationship is simple.
They aren't.
Love does not make people uncomplicated.
There can be distance.
History.
Things said.
Things not said.
Years when two people understood each other completely, and years when they didn't understand each other at all.
Perhaps that is why I am less interested in making mothers and daughters look like some perfect version of what that relationship is supposed to be.
I am interested in them.
As they are now.
Because now keeps moving.
One day you are the little girl leaning into her.
Then you are standing shoulder to shoulder.
And one day, perhaps, she leans into you.
A photograph cannot stop any of that.
It cannot keep a mother young.
It cannot keep a daughter small.
It cannot make a complicated relationship simple.
It can only say:
This was us.
Here.
At this point in our lives.
And years later, when the photograph means something quite different from what it meant on the day we made it, there she still is.
The woman who knew you first.
And perhaps, by then, the woman you finally came to know too.
JOHANNESBURG PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHER
One Moment. One Portrait. Forever
© 2005–2026 Bridget Corke Photography
Blairgowrie · Johannesburg · South Africa
International Master's in Portrait Photography
One of only two in Africa.