Sorry I Gave Birth I Disappeared But Now I’m Back
Photographer Andi Galdi found herself pregnant and lost a sense of who she was in the world. Fortunately, she navigated her way back.
Andi Galdi and writer Charlotte Jansen are friends. They’re also late-night email correspondents and their own micro support network.
Amongst conversations on work, art, travel, politics and love; the challenges of motherhood are one of their main topics of conversation. Their relationship is a space where they can lay bare their feelings, anxieties, frustrations, and fears. Here, we publish excerpts of their emails to each other alongside photographs that will feature in an upcoming book of Andi’s photography work titled, Sorry I Gave Birth I Disappeared But Now I’m Back, published by Trolley Books.
The name of the project and the photographs within it bring to life the visceral experience of becoming a mother and losing yourself; a life on pause while you tend to another; a psychic, emotional and physical adjustment to this new way of being. Do you ever come back? Yes, but not as you were. A new you emerges and goes back out into the world, sometimes scarred, sometimes shaken, sometimes a little wiser.
The images and the written exchanges between Andi and Charlotte give an insight into the lost and lonely feelings that can come with motherhood but they also express a deep love and compassion for all that mothers go through and the support that they offer one another as they find their way through together—apart.
