TRACE ME HERE
My concept of home has evolved from a place of fear and exclusion to one of safety and acceptance. In creating a new domestic space, like many parents, I sought to redefine what it means to create a home and what the concept of home has meant to me. This journey towards co-creating a domestic space to raise a child is marked by intentionality, radical acceptance, and the continuous effort to redefine family and faith in a queer context—the queer household existing as a “third space” within a societies heteronormative family structure. Our presence in our neighborhood has been central to our approach to creating a home where love, autonomy, and reciprocity are paramount. As two queer moms raising a white boy, our desire and act of queering the space is intentional in counteracting heteronormativity and patriarchal systems.
I’m considering how my mental health and identity were shaped during the earliest years of my life in my childhood home and by my religious upbringing.
The memories of my abuse* contribute to my need to interrogate everyone’s motives, my ability to recognize and accept love, my ability to trust, my body/mind’s fear of eternal damnation, and my struggle to believe that I am worth anything. These beliefs were ingrained in me over twenty-five years ago, and the path to healing is ongoing. The latent impact of physical and religious trauma reverberates in inconvenient moments. In my dreams, my body winces, the present melds with the past, and the past invades the present. How do I create a space with an idea when it is something I don't think I have ever encountered before?
I’m contemplating how I trace the visual narrative of our life together—how memory, place, and image intertwine. Kodak once etched into the collective consciousness the idea that photographs are vessels of memory, paths to hold onto fleeting moments. Today, the act of documenting family life is more immediate, more accessible than ever—yet also more ephemeral. Images are stored, shared, deleted; caught in a continuous loop of editing and revision. Where once the photo albums of my disposable-camera childhood were tucked away, brought out only on occasion, now the scroll of my phone becomes a living archive—a flickering reel of memories, repeating and reordering themselves, searing time and place into the fabric of our shared remembering.
I’m considering the utility and application of the smartphone camera on a technical level. Using the smartphone to capture “moments” in the space my family occupies and calls home, I look for moments of magic and wonder. Embracing the mistakes, the blurs, and snapshots alongside the critically aligned imagery is a nod to the imperfect nature of the family vacation aesthetic and the observation of the magic in how light moves through the space and around its inhabitants.
In these small acts of looking—through the lens, through memory, through the rhythms of daily life—I return again and again to the question of what makes a home, not just for myself, but for those I love. Perhaps it’s not a place we find, but one we learn to shape, frame by frame, into something that holds us.
Hello, World!