08/28/2026
Before the baby, there is her.
I get to photograph her in the quiet before her entire world changes.
Her hands resting on the life she created.
Her body doing something extraordinary.
Her mind wondering what the next few weeks will bring.
We make pregnancy look soft in photographs.
But becoming a mother is anything but soft.
She is standing at the edge of one of the biggest physical and mental transformations a person can experience.
Soon, she will know a kind of love that is almost impossible to explain.
But she may also know exhaustion that scares her.
Anxiety she can’t turn off.
Thoughts that don’t feel like her own.
Loneliness in a house that is never quiet.
The strange feeling of missing the person she used to be while loving the person who changed her.
That is the part we don’t photograph enough.
We photograph the bump.
We photograph the birth.
We photograph the tiny fingers wrapped around hers.
But there are no photographs of the 4 a.m. breakdown.
The shower she cried through.
The moment she handed someone the baby because she desperately needed five minutes where nobody touched her.
The guilt that followed.
The fear of admitting she wasn’t okay because she thought everyone would wonder how she could possibly struggle when she had this beautiful baby in her arms.
And that silence can become dangerous.
Maternal mental health cannot be reduced to “baby blues.”
Postpartum depression, anxiety and psychosis are real. They deserve to be recognized, spoken about and treated with the seriousness they require.
A mother can desperately love her children and still become desperately unwell.
Those truths can exist together.
So while I will always love creating beautiful photographs of motherhood, I never want the beauty of an image to become another reason we assume the woman inside it must be okay.
My camera can capture her smile.
It cannot capture everything she is carrying.
So take her picture.
But more importantly—
See her.
Listen to her.
Believe her.
Stay when the newborn excitement fades and everyone else goes home.
Ask about the woman holding the baby with the same urgency we ask about the baby she’s holding.
Because this photograph isn’t just the beginning of a baby’s story.
It’s the last photograph of this version of her.
And when she steps out of this frame and into the trenches of motherhood, I hope she is surrounded by people who remind her:
You don’t have to survive this part alone.
Wild Grove Photography 🌾
