Invisible Mothers: Creating Through Grief

A Post–Mother’s Day Reflection

Where is the golden child that never was?
She lives here. In yarn and pigment. In stitched bone and unspoken prayers.

Each year, Mother’s Day arrives like an old wound reopening.

My biological mother died when I was three, a casualty of Camp Lejeune’s poisoned waters.
My stepmother—the only true mother I ever knew—died when I was twenty.
She raised me. She saved me. Then she left me.

I’ve never held a child of my own.

This painting—framed in the tenderness of hand-crochet, streaked with the colors of loss and longing—is a mirror of a life imagined.
A radiant soul never born, yet somehow always felt.
Her eyes are wide with questions the world won’t answer.
Her lips are soft with a voice I’ll never hear.

This piece is titled with the ache that haunts so many of us:
“Where is the golden child that never was?”

It is part of The Empty Womb, a 27-piece installation that emerged from the double grief of losing my mothers—and the one grief I carry still:
The one who never came.

The last thing my biological mother ever said to me before her final hospital stay:
“You’re such a good little artist.”
She stayed. I went home.
I never saw her again.

That sentence—those seven words—may be the reason I make art.

Because I cannot mother a child, I mother beauty.
Because I cannot bear life, I bear witness.

To those who feel unseen on Mother's Day: I see you.
To those who have lost a child, or a mother, or the dream of either: I am with you.
To those who create because they cannot carry—may you know that your creations, too, are sacred.

Art is how I stitch myself back together.
It is how I carry my lineage forward, even when the bloodline ends with me.

To all grieving motherless daughters, healing mother wounds, and infertile women:
Let my art be a place where you find home. I’ve got you.

Until the golden child returns in another form…

With love,
Robbi

✨ Call to Action

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