Our Mother's Gardens

Black Girl Miracle
Nov 18, 2022
1 min read

Our Mother’s Gardens is the first in an ongoing body of work exploring the adultification of Black girls—how they are often asked to grow up too quickly, carrying responsibilities, expectations, and emotional weight beyond their years.

This project reflects on what is inherited and what is interrupted: the quiet exchange of sacrifice, the shaping of identity through responsibility, and the tension between resilience, joy, and becoming.

Portrait from Our Mother’s Gardens exploring Black girlhood and adultification

Laila and Alyssa Abbott, photographed by Chineze Okpalaoka

What does it mean to inherit not only wisdom, strength, and survival—but also grief, obligation, and the unspoken belief that womanhood must be earned through endurance?

Inspired in part by the emotional and cultural inheritances passed between generations of Black women, Our Mother’s Gardens considers the stories young girls absorb about caregiving, sacrifice, pleasure, and worth—and what becomes possible when those narratives are reconsidered with tenderness.

Alyssa Abbott (left) and Laila Abbott (right), photographed by Chineze Okpalaoka

“Our laughter is a holy hymn: It preaches sermons disrupting service making servants of our grief Beneath the surface of these smiles —a Bethesda of tears; bittersweet They belong to our mothers for whom this kind of joy was only a dream.”