Material Meaning- The Story Behind the Children’s Drawings

Letting Go

You know the feeling when you wake from a dream and it lingers — vivid and visceral— like you actually lived through it? Or its opposite: moving  through your waking life slightly out of focus. You were there, but somehow detached. 

Maybe the disconnection comes with time.  Routines shift, people drift, and what once grounded you fades from reach.  Eventually, the life you lived begins to feel more like imagination than memory.   

One morning, I woke with a revelation — sharp and undeniable. I had been pushed out. Moved away from an identity I once cherished more than any version of myself.

That was the tension I’d been carrying. The frustration I couldn’t name. The fear I hadn’t fully faced.

And then, I got out of bed.
And I moved beyond motherhood.

Tangible Fact

I have a scar — a long, asymmetrical line that runs from my right hip to my left. It dips in the middle, where the raised tissue is thickest. It’s proof of not one, but two C-sections. And when they call it a “section,” they’re not exaggerating. The scar cuts you in half — ironically, much like a mannequin.

After I gave birth, I didn’t feel human in the way I once had. I felt animal — raw, instinctual, ferociously protective. I honestly believe I could have killed someone if they tried to harm my children. (Not a goal, of course, just a truth.)

I breastfed on demand. We shared a family bed. I prepared their food fresh from scratch. Baked cookies, cakes and pies regularly.  I talked to them constantly. I read to them every night. I kissed them, hugged them, praised them. We played — a lot. I was all in.

I gave them what I wished I’d had growing up. 

That strength carried us to early adolescence. 
That’s when the ground began to shift.
It started to erode beneath our feet.
The world we had built together became trickier. Messier. 

Impossible to hold onto.

No Turning Back

The kids were delivered to college — different states, different lives.
The years of toiling to make every tuition payment on time gave me a continued sense of purpose. They would graduate debt-free. That was the goal, the mission. I clung to the program.

Then COVID hit.
We didn’t share a bubble — we were three bubbles in three states.
I felt jealous of their bubble friends, of the people allowed inside while I felt like an outsider with no ticket to the event.  

Thankfully, we survived.
And as the world staggered forward, so did we — in new directions.

We were growing and changing, as much by nature as by force.

The Space Between Us

For months, I had been filling sketchbooks with spontaneous drawings inspired by my growing fascination with proxemics—the study of how we use space to communicate: personally, culturally, architecturally, and digitally. It’s about how close we stand, how far we remain, how we shape and are shaped by the distances between us.

COVID sharpened our awareness of space. Suddenly, every inch mattered. Proximity became loaded—intimate, risky, precious. I started thinking of the space between us—what I now call “The SBU”—as its own shape. A living contour, like a Rorschach test, revealing the emotional temperature between people.

I drew myself in relation to the important people in my life.  When I drew my children and me, the spaces between us could loom large—territorial, uneasy, like separate countries with closed borders. But when I sketched the space between mother-me and child-me, the shapes were smaller, more navigable. They linked together like constellations—dots connected by iterations of self.

I needed to see those shapes in three dimensions. So I gathered more mannequins. I began positioning them in pairs and trios, examining how the spaces between them spoke when the figures themselves said nothing.

A Package Arrives

There’s not much traffic out here. When a delivery truck turns onto our gravel drive, the dogs lose their minds. No doorbell needed—we always know when something’s coming.

This time, the package was for me.

In a gesture both thoughtful and unexpected, my mother had compiled a scrapbook. Page after page: photos of me—a slideshow of my life, as she saw it. I flipped through slowly. That girl, that version of me, wasn’t the whole story.

The dissonance caught me off guard. Seeing your life summarized in images curated by someone else is strange. It’s first-person viewing of a third-person edit—someone else’s idea of what mattered most. You realize how much of your life was lived internally—how little of that shows up in photographs.

It was both tender and jarring. A kind of emotional slap.

At the same time—serendipitously, maybe—I’d been dragging old storage boxes down from the attic, filled with my children’s photos and drawings. Souvenirs of their youth. I was assembling remembrance books for each of them.

It felt a little like stalking the past—mine and theirs.
Looking back was harder than I expected. All I wanted was to move forward.
And I didn’t want to shape their memories for them. They have strong, independent voices. It’s not my place—or my desire—to speak for them.

So I asked myself:
How do I honor the past without getting trapped in it?

I looked at the boxes and boxes of their drawings and things I’d carried across homes, across years.
And I knew what I’d do next:
I would cover small mannequins with those drawings.

The Children’s Drawings

Each drawing holds a moment.
I can see my children’s natural development on these pages—unfiltered, free of rules, untouched by pressure. They hadn’t yet met The Joneses. These images are pure: they're early conceptions of their world, created without hesitation.

Like my scar, these drawings are evidence.
Proof of what we lived. 

The “mannekids” I make from these drawings aren’t my children. My children belong to themselves.
But the mannekids carry the gifts they gave me—they gifted me a deeper understanding of what it means to live a full life.  And they’ve given me perspective. 

I use the drawings because I have them—boxes of them.
Because they’re honest and playful.
Because they hold weight.
And because they offer the chance to transform what was into something new—an amalgamation of possibility.

We were all once children.
And we are all someone’s child.

Freedom

When I was about ten, I heard the saying, “If you love someone, let them go.”

It made me furious.

To hell with that, I thought. If you love someone, you stick around. You hold on. You don’t leave.

But one morning, I got out of bed and everything felt different.
I had let motherhood go—not the love, but the role.
And with it, I let go of my adult children.
Not out of pain, not out of loss—out of clarity.
There was no sadness in it. Just a deep breath, a clean slate.