Mummy, shall we pretend that I am little again like when I came out of your tummy?
Darling, you do remember that you didn’t come out of my tummy, don’t you?
Yes mummy, but who cares?We can pretend.

La madre attesa (The expected mother) is a journey, the one that brought little Lina Isabel from Bogota to her new home in Rome. But it is also the journey of Irene Alison who adopted Isabel in 2019. A journey through motherhood, a novel in images, expertly created and edited by the author, thanks to which she discovered another self, one she didn't even believe existed.

On October 23, 2019 I met my daughter for the first time. She was five years old, wearing a pink polyester dress and hair that seemed to be sewn to her head in a million little braids. As a mother, I was born within the walls of an office in a low building in Bogotá, Colombia, decorated for the occasion with balloons that, a few minutes earlier, my husband and I had rushed to inflate, with shortness of breath and throat dry with emotion. After a three and a half year journey along the arduous paths of adoption, our moment had finally arrived: the meeting with the long-awaited little girl. But what I thought was a landing place turned out to be a starting point. Regardless of genetic affiliation, the relationship between a mother and child may not be love at first sight. Having a child – even if desired and conquered with the determination that adoption requires – does not mean becoming a mother. This discovery, after so much effort to get to meet, made me feel empty, inadequate, angry, guilty.

With these words Irene Alison opens her book, but also a debate. On the difficulty of becoming a mother, of losing one's independence to dedicate oneself completely to another person. But above all on the path of building a new identity, that of a mother, a path that is not always easy and free of obstacles. Tiredness, the sense of inadequacy, the fear of not being able to complete the task of being a mother every day, clash with the strongest emotions, with the love that only a bond like that between mother and daughter can create. In this swing of emotions and sensations the author questions herself, telling the reader — through a selection of images chosen from the hundreds she has taken in recent years — about her new, long and beautiful journey, in which one never stops learning.

Throughout this journey, photography was the language with which I tried to speak to her when I felt like I had no words, it was the bridge thanks to which I began to get closer to her, when it seemed to me that an unbridgeable distance separated us.

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