Expectations: 30 Women Talk about Becoming a Mother

Pictures of mothers and their babies have always been a focus of art--as evidenced by the prevalence of Madonna and child paintings gracing the walls of museums around the world. Expectations, by photographer Anne Hamersky and writer Laurie Wagner, continues this artful tradition. Hamersky's beautiful portraits of thirty new mothers are accompanied by Wagner's text, based on in-depth interviews.

These mothers range from a successful artist to a young drug addict to adoptive parents to the mother of triplets. The stories of the women encompass a complex range of emotions--not only "full-bodied, heart-wrenching, breath-stopping love," but confusion, disaster, ambivalence, sorrow, fatigue, and bemusement, too. The breadth of experience reflected in the text, combined with the portraits of real people, sends a powerful message to new mothers: Mom, you are not alone. --Ericka Lutz