Weathered Soul
The Quiet Months
by Marion van den Ende
I love him — of that I am certain, even if I feel it through a grey fog. I bow over his sleep and at the same time I am looking somewhere else, with a single tear I cannot quite place. The love is there. And the distance is there too.
- TechniqueHahnemühle · Dibond
- Size100 × 75 cm
- EditionEdition of 24
- Price€995
On this psyche
After a birth everyone expects happiness, and sometimes what comes instead is a silence no one announced. Postnatal depression is not a lack of love and not the sign of a bad mother. It is a condition — an interplay of hormones, exhaustion and being overwhelmed — that drains the colour from the days, while the love goes on quietly beneath the surface.
That is what this work shows: two things that are true at once. The tender bow toward the child, and the face turned away with its single tear. Not two mothers, but one — holding her child through a fog she did not choose. Many women know this and say nothing, ashamed of a feeling that deserves no blame.
Perhaps the most important thing is this: the quiet months pass. With rest, with help, with a spoken word to someone who listens, the colour returns. That love and this grey fog could exist together does not mean you have failed — it means you carried a hard season, and that you came through it.
