By Olga Bushkova

My mom was 22 when I was born. I’m 27. And I have no kids. Everybody has kids. But I don’t. My husband is the reason why I have no kids. We didn’t talk about kids before we got married. He says, mothers are dumb. That I will ruin my life if I get pregnant. I didn’t know I’d need to convince him.

But I want him to be a father. I surround him with pictures of kids. I hang them everywhere. So that he starts liking them. I got old family albums from his parents. To show he was a kid too. Once.

I keep a diary. I record all discussions. I’ll put everything in a book. And I will give it to him. And it will convince him. I know it will.

I always dreamed of becoming a mother. My husband always offered rational arguments against it. His recurring statement was that women run the risk of turning themselves into housewives if they become mothers before establishing themselves professionally.

Eventually we decided to make a playful agreement: if I would manage to establish myself as a photographer, that is, by producing a photobook, then my husband would agree to have children. Eventually I attended a photographic masterclass of Magnum photographer Alex Majoli, where I conceived the project about my dream of becoming a mother. The project has now been completed in a form of a dummy photobook.

I use my personal diary notes, photos I have taken of other children and (presumably) happy families, archive photos of mine and my husband’s parents, audio recordings of my personal conversations with my husband, photos of the walls of our apartment that I continuously decorated with pictures, etc. The book is constructed as a visual diary of a person whose life is focused on one goal: to have a baby. The idyllic love story (I started dating my husband when I was 18 and married him when I was 20, subsequently moving with him to Switzerland) grows into a more dramatic struggle between the rational arguments of the male and the irrational feelings of the female.