Photos from my OWN birth circa 1986
If you visit my parent’s house…it won’t take you long to find the bookshelf of photo albums in our living room. Album after album is filled with images from every year of my childhood. Growing up, my sisters and I would sometimes roll our eyes when our parents pulled out their cameras (yet again) but now at 32…these albums are everything to me. When my parent’s neighborhood caught on fire during the Waldo Canyon Fire, I called my mom in a panic…and told her that if she could grab anything…she needed to grab those albums. I’m so grateful both their house and our family albums were spared.
A couple of months after Dorothy was born, I found myself in my parent’s living room…filtering through our family albums yet again. I opened up the album entitled 1986 and stumbled upon photos from my OWN birth story. I’m sure I’d had seen them several times over the years, but I don’t think I’d looked at them since I became a birth photographer or a mother myself. And although I had heard my mom share her birth story countless times, there was something so magical about getting to see the love and joy on my family’s face on the day I arrived in the world. My mom always told me that the day I was born was one of the best days of her life (thank you mama!), and I’ve felt that strong love every single day.
Photos of our births aren’t only gifts for us…but they’re gifts for our children too.
My mom was a first-time mom in her 30s. She was induced at 38 weeks due to decreased fetal movement. My older half-sisters were SO excited to have a baby sister (you can see the big smile on my older sister’s face in the fourth image). My grandparents were also over-the-moon as the last baby they’d welcomed into the family (their third daughter) had passed away just a day or so after birth.
I know that some people think that birth photography is a trend…but when I found these photos…my eyes welled with tears. I’m confident that we will continue to preserve these moments because they truly are some of the most priceless, magical, and healing days of our lives.
