Mommy Nervosa

An ongoing photo series depicting my mother's life long struggle with anorexia nervosa and other mental health issues. As experienced through the eyes of her now 23 year old daughter.

I put my arm around my mother in hopes to feel close, although it's been at least 12 years since I last felt close to her. She slowly mimics the motion back, not out of reciprocity but out of a scripted way that affection is supposed to be had. " I feel nothing, it's like I am dead" she says, and I can tell because her bare hand on my arm feels cold, and distant without feeling or love. I walk out and close the door after I make some joke, exiting in laughter, I cry when I get to my room. How do you fix the unfixable? How do you accept that your mother is withering away and no matter what you do, it's out of your control? How do you cope knowing you're all alone?

I have been exploring my mother, her mental issues, and the toll it’s had on our relationship and how I navigate in this world alone since I was seventeen years old. Now, twenty-three, I have created documentaries and an ongoing photo series, which she is often the main subject of or the explanation of my own character.

Both us hailing from the island of Gozo, my mother, Salvina is an artist too, although never having produced much money from her passion due to lack of resources, marketing and education. Without such things, she is a housekeeper, like all other Maltese immigrant women in America.

She has suffered from mental illness all my life and her life too. She has been anorexic for as long as I can remember and her paranoia and irritability has gotten worse over the years. All of this along with her eccentric fashion style has led me to believe she suffers from Schizoid Personality disorder.

There are things I thought were normal in my childhood which have now been a source of consistent investigation. Trying to find truth and peace for myself through my camera and words. She used to put me and my sister in dangerous situations while growing up. I can vividly recall her recklessly driving without care, me and my sister would glance at one another in routine, reciting a prayer in the back seat at age five as she chain smoked. I remember the ashes coming in through my window like bullets as we hurled down the road and she spun 360 degrees near a cliff. There are many other vivid memories and I believe I am attracted to visual art for this reason. My life has been so starkly defined by traumatic moments that will forever be ingrained in my very fabric and the only way I can communicate my reality is to capture it, for words have never done me much justice.

We moved to NYC when I was nine years old but I was apart from my mother after my parents got separated from ages thirteen through eighteen. I lived with my father in that time, he too is an immigrant from Gozo, and someone I have never have had a full conversation with to this day but he spent sixteen hours working everyday so we could have what we wanted.

While in separation she lived alone in Gozo collecting government unemployment, and as a thirteen year old child she would rely on me for advice and confide in me her deep admiration to kill herself even though I was 5000 miles away. This furthered and solidified our relationship, me as a parent and her as the child even if in reality I was the helpless, depressed, neglected child. From then on I never dared to speak about myself or reveal any emotion to her because somehow she’d always be the focus and even if I did confide my truth it seemed that she lacked the ability to feel, to comfort, to resonate, making it all the more disappointing.

In my work I get very up close and personal, consistently using flash to enhance the harshness and unflattery that I have so often experienced. This of course comes with feeling guilty because I do believe she is a helpless victim to her own mental illnesses while also having no self awareness or the capability of even comprehending her own actions. This has motivated me to challenge myself in also portraying her and her passions with care and compassion throughout quarantine.

Spending time with her is complicated because she cannot maintain a normal, stimulating conversation, but photography makes it easier in a way because it allows me to hide, to give direction and that may be the only way we can have simple moments together, because the focus in that short time is on something outside of us.

I hope my work makes others feel less alone, or able to resonate in some way. My world has often felt without hope but I have always strived in anything I do, to make myself proud, to get myself somewhere. I try to imagine a future of positivity filled with love and support, one that can come outside my familial space. Having recently graduated I am trying to make that happen, and financially support myself to have my own space to grow and finally reclaim my own mental tranquility.