In a world where nothing is entirely safe, innocent or wholly clear, mothers place themselves between such a world and their children in order to create for them a world that is bright, innocent and safe. The price of this impossible task is that they are continually forced to bury their deepest contradictions somewhere within themselves, and sometimes to make the most difficult decisions amid the deepest conflicts and contradictions of their inner lives.

Before everything that is wrongly placed in this world, mothers are compelled to take on the impossible duty of always standing in the right place—a place from which they are expected to hide even the failures and shortcomings of their own incompletely lived lives from themselves.

They become guardians of childhood innocence and of children who will soon be thrown, by all the deficiencies of society, into the psychological condition of the orphan, their protected childhood world of innocence, light and safety destroyed.

And again mothers return in the form of perpetual mourners, sheltering their children in a world without shelter, although they themselves have never found a refuge.

Aydin Areta

Inspired by a conversation from the film
“Simon Simon”, written by Mike Mills