06/17/2026
I was asked recently why it's so important to me to get moms IN the photos. The simple answer is, I know what it's like to not love the way you look, because for fifteen years I looked in the mirror & hated who I saw. I hate knowing other women feel the same. I want them to have at least ONE photo where they look at themselves & see how beautiful the rest of the world sees them.
Society tells us thin is in, wrinkles are bad, we need filler & extensions & GLP1s & teeth whitening & if we don't look like the influencers in our feeds that we are somehow less than.
We consume this info daily & accept it as fact. We start to believe that we're not enough & eventually, we start to say out loud, in front of our daughters, things like 'I'm so fat', 'I need to lose 20 lbs', 'I hate the way I look' or 'I wish I didn't smile like that.' And slowly, over time, those things become the voices in our daughters' heads. They are told they look like their mom, but then they hear mom saying she hates the way she looks. It's toxic & cyclical.
I had a mom who did none of those things & still at 15 years old I looked in the mirror & began hating what I saw. It breaks my heart to know that little girls, many as young as 10 and 11, are looking in the mirror & seeing anything less than the perfect girl that God made. It hurts to know that they feel like they need a full face of make-up to be beautiful or need to diet to stay thin. If you don't think your daughter is hearing or seeing these things, I PROMISE they are.
It may seem like such a small thing, inconsequential even, to think that by taking a photo of a mother I can change any of that. But if I can give a mother 1 photo of herself that she loves, then perhaps she'll say out loud "I love this photo of me" or "I love my smile here" & her little girl will hear it & that can be the beginning of reframing how she sees herself. It cyclical, as I said, so maybe small things like this can begin combatting that cycle.
