Someone Else's Mother

I grew up in London with a Filipina woman called Juning, who had four children of her own living on a small island in the Philippines 7,000 miles away. Juning worked as a nanny in Manila, but in 1974, knowing that a local income could not stretch to cover her children’s school fees, she decided to look for work abroad. Her youngest child was two years old when she left for Hong Kong.
In 1976, my parents and brother, who was then a year old, moved from London to Hong Kong for my father’s work with a bank. My mother soon became pregnant with me, and in the spring of 1977 she adverti- sed for a ‘mother’s help’. Juning was one of four people who respon- ded to the post.
Two years later, we moved back to London, and Juning came with us. She continued to live with my family for twenty-two years, until 1999 when she remarried and moved to the neighbouring street. In 2007 she retired to her island.
Now, as an adult and a mother myself, the notion that Juning lived apart from her children for three decades is painful to imagine. I can’t shake off a feeling of strangeness that their lives and mine carried on in parallel for all those years, mine with their mother, theirs without. We are all part of the same curious equation, and after decades of li- ving in tandem but remotely, I wanted to try to understand how this all happened and what the effect on the people involved had been.
Caroline Irby is a British photographer based in London. Her focus is on social documentary, portraiture, and advertising photography, and her work has been published and exhibited worldwide. After gradu- ating in Philosophy and French from Edinburgh Uni-
versity, Caroline worked for several years mainly in developing countries on editorial assignments, NGO commissions, and personal projects. Increasingly, the subjects Caroline chooses are closer to home. Her particular areas of interest are immigration and children.