The Other Mother

Sarah Sentilles on what to expect when you’re expectant.

SOMETIMES the woman in the photograph turns her back to the camera. Sometimes she kneels behind a couch or a chair. Sometimes her face is scratched out or blurred or burned or cut off by the frame. Sometimes her entire body is covered by black cloth or patterned fabric or a rug.

The images—1,002 in all, shot during the 19th and early 20th centuries—were collected over a decade ago by the artist Linda Fregni Nagler for her 2013 book, The Hidden Mother, an homage to an accident of technology. When cameras were still new, they had excruciatingly long exposure times; photographing a child required someone to hold the portrait’s subject still. That someone was often the child’s mother. In many of these images, all the viewer can see of the mother is her hand, emerging from under a blanket or from some unseen part of the room. The pictures haunt me. They have no caption, no title, no date. The viewer has to turn to the back to find any information at all, and there she will read descriptions like this: 7.5 x 6.5 cm, dark, gem size, ink stain, red cheeks, scratched tintype. To see what’s pictured, you must get close, intimate. Nagler’s book of images comes to seem like a family album, though one that belongs to strangers. Family albums and strangers are on my mind lately. My husband, Eric, and I were recently certified as foster parents. In the foster care system, we are designated “nonrelative care providers,” also known as “stranger care.” We are awaiting a call that will tell us there is a child in need of a home. Our phone will ring, and we will become parents, maybe for a few days, maybe forever.