What is my mother’s favourite colour?
That question popped into my head and I realised that I had absolutely no idea. Do you know your mother’s favourite anything – colour, food, magazine, singer, movie etc? I don’t know anything about my mother. She has always been just the carer, provider, someone who nagged me for not doing the right thing (by her standards of course). I never knew her as a woman just like me. In Korea, she wasn’t even called by her name. She was simply known as Songy’s Mother (that’s was a normal thing until the early 90s’ but not sure if it is still the case).
Margaret, my client Neonie’s mother, brought her favourite hoodie jumper for her shoot. She seriously wanted to wear a hoodie (and insisted on wearing it up) and she looked fab. Neonie lives in Perth and her parents are in SA. This photo shoot was something very special for both of them as they don’t get to see each other that often.
Does your mother have her favourite hoodie? Or simply does she like colour black? Or would she look absolutely fabulous in black?
Or does she have her favourite dress in which she looks great and makes her look 20 years younger? When was the last time she wore that dress?
If you know answers to all of those questions you are lucky because I, as mentioned earlier, know nothing about my mother (not having seen her for 10 years doesn’t help either).
Quite a few daughters – clients – came to me with their mothers in the past 12 months. I’m very grateful for the experience because those sessions helped me to understand finally that my mother was once a woman. While I plan to have a visit back to Korea at some point to re-discover the woman who brought me to this world, I suggest that you do the same if you don’t know much about your mother.
Having a photo shoot with her, of course, would be something exquisite (as my clients all call it now) but it doesn’t have to be that grand. Just find out, look and talk to her not as your mother but as a woman for once.
