fter six years of living outside home, I returned to live with my family earlier this year in the midst of the pandemic. Living with them the past year made me question the dynamics of family structure, especially my mother’s position in the family. I began to notice how wifehood and motherhood have wearied her more than age has. The comfort with which she has been taken for granted hangs heavy in the air of our house. My mother’s abuse is invisible. There are no bruises or scars. But this abuse is also deep rooted. The ease with which she has been conditioned to sacrifice her own dreams has become so normalised that she no longer questions it. Instead, she accepts this as her duty and her fate. The older I get, the more her acceptance saddens me. The history of patriarchy, like in the rest of the world, runs deep in my family. Layered with social, cultural and political conditioning, the weight of womanhood lies heavy on our shoulders. When I started looking into family archives of the women in my family, I wondered about the lives they lived before they became wives and mothers. I wondered about the stories which were never photographed – the ones that did not find their place in the family album. This prompted me to start a dialogue with my mother. As we spoke about all the things which we had never said out loud before, our conversations began taking form as photographs. The act of photographing became collaborative and performative, allowing us to create a space to free ourselves, to be what is otherwise denied to us. Through this work, I want to question the forms of patriarchy which have seeped into my mother’s life, and in turn mine, asking us to romanticise this role of ‘giving’ as the absolute pinnacle of achievement in a woman’s life. Even though this is a story about my family, my objective is to bring forth a more universal context in terms of the position of a woman in a family. I would further like to develop the work in that direction.