My mother doesn't work

I am officially a housewife. Saying it out loud still embarrasses me because the word carries a shadow of idleness. Yet there is always work waiting, the kind that keeps a home alive and somehow appears to “do itself.”

“My mom doesn’t work. Well, she cooks and keeps the house clean, but she doesn’t have a real job…” — that’s how my son answered his friend’s question: “What does your mom do?”

Hearing it, I asked myself what, exactly, fills my days until they consume me. If this isn’t work, then what is it? I don’t go to an office and I don’t receive a salary. My maternity leave with my third child ended recently, and now I am officially a housewife. Saying it out loud still embarrasses me because the word carries a shadow of idleness. Yet there is always work waiting, the kind that keeps a home alive and somehow appears to “do itself.”

Even though the images are self-portraits, the figure is not just me, but a shared image of many women in similar roles. The work unfolds in two visual registers: staged, hyperbolic self-portraits that amplify the absurdity of daily life, and a second body of images that assembles the hidden traces of domestic reality — objects, fragments, documents, and even online comments that reveal both the intimate weight of care and the external pressures of social judgment.

What began as a private reckoning turned out to be a larger story shared across languages and cultures. This project is about the unseen labor that sustains families and the expectations that ask women to give endlessly while their efforts quietly disappear. By making this work visible, sometimes with tenderness and sometimes with exaggeration, I hope to open space for recognition, empathy, and honest conversation.