Claire & Hilary

When my mom was 19, she had her first baby girl. She used to talk about the days after Hilary was born. There had been a big ice storm that kept family from visiting my mom and Hilary in the hospital, for the first several days of Hilary’s life, it was just the two of them. And so it was just the two of them, until my mom and dad got together and had me. As her first child, Hilary taught my mom a lot of lessons about motherhood–about what it meant to watch her children learn life’s hard lessons for themselves, about what it meant to have conflict with her kids, but ultimately what a beautiful and frustrating thing it was for her to love her children unconditionally, fiercely, and regardless of all circumstance. One of my mother’s greatest treasures was getting to have Hilary near her again, when she moved back to Utah in October of 2016. She wanted nothing more than for her kids all to be in one place where she could cherish them.