From the instant you lay eyes on them, hear their crying and touch their soft supple skin, you instantly fall in love, forming an eternal affinity. Celebrating a new life cradled in your arms is literally a blessing. Life is a beautiful thing, something we fight to protect and nurture into an upbringing that can save the ever declining human race from entering a self-inflicted apocalyptic age.
Francesca Cesari, a photographer based in Bologna, Italy reminisced of her own beginnings as a mother and photographed a friend of hers with child abreast. Originally, Cesari simply had it in mind to capture the beautiful canvas of mother and child glorifying the bond they share until the little model voiced its discomfort the only known way and was breast-fed in a private room. A wondrous moment sparked and the plea of capturing the invisible connection of mother and child was seen with greater means other than a camera lens.
According to Cesari, "I silently followed her and saw how, in a few minutes, the baby's body moved more and more slowly while the mother was singing an undefined melody, until the baby was definitively satisfied and surrendered to sleep." This quotation reminds me of the origin story of Athena from Greco-Roman mythology who was born from the head of her father and is literally a child of pure thoughts. I allude to Athena's origin because I truly believe that love far exceeds what we all think or what the media tells us to think. Ponder this: a literal bond between two individuals feeding off of each other and listening to their natural rhythms.
Moments as beautiful and connecting as these are a class of their own, physical and cognitive reunions that are long forgotten and only appear for the superficial masks we decide to wear. Here, there are no disguises, only love. Cesari continued her project and transpired her series that captures the maternal connection— a giving and receiving of life-forces titled "In The Room." Veering to a different path from the original thought of focusing on the dual-relationship, Cesari soon altered her plan and allowed a window behind the scenes of the other mothers experiencing the same moments of elation, and anger, through sadness, and utter exhaustion.
Ultimately, Cesari yearns for the world to see passed all the glitter and glam of nurturing a child. The perfect Gerber baby is nothing but a fantasy. Rather than focusing on that, the focus is geared toward the strength of mothers everywhere. So instead of picking on women for nursing their own flesh and blood using a "sexually" stigmatized part of their body instead of baby formula apt to support them. Whether hiding in a corner in the hopes of evading discrepancy and thinking it revolting, pornographic or down right wrong for any reason, contemplate the instinctual beauty. If it is normal for animals to do it in the undomesticated world we once knew so well, why is it so frowned upon for the modernized world?
All in all, why suppress such a beautiful thing, especially in today's time of knowing more at a younger age? Younger generations have proven to be ignorantly wiser than prior generations so let it out— for the right reasons. I might not be a woman, but I condone breastfeeding simply as a right as equals and for the fact that these infants will grow up and be a part of our future, and we want our children's futures to be bright.
