As a newborn photographer, I’ve come to understand that the earliest days of motherhood are both beautifully disorienting and deeply grounding all at once. Your world shifts overnight—routines dissolve, emotions deepen, and suddenly, everything revolves around this tiny human who has changed your life in the most profound way.
What follows is a heartfelt glimpse into that experience, shared in the words of one of my clients, a new mom, as she reflects on those first tender, transformative weeks with her newborn baby.
Suddenly, I’m the Parent
“My gynecologist described having a baby as “a bomb going off inside your life.” Ten weeks later, I can attest to the accuracy of this statement. Nothing is the same. Everything has changed.
It has been an explosion of cloth. Burp cloths, onesies, footies, pants, teeny tiny socks, changing table cloths, wet wipes, disinfectant wipes, dry wipes, baby blankets, bassinet sheets, muslin swaddles, sleep sacks, and something called a Merlin’s Magic Sleep Suit…?
I have completely abandoned the hard edges of my kidless adult life for this soft, cloth-covered existence. Now, I function in three-hour increments, an endless cycle of feeding, burping, changing, playing, and sleeping (the baby, not me.) Oh, and bouncing. My baby, it turns out, doesn’t like to be rocked to sleep so much as agitated at a precise frequency on a yoga ball until they pass out. I’ve never bounced so much in my life.
And I've never been a baby person. In fact, if you had handed me a baby before, they would immediately sense that they were in an unseasoned lap and start crying, at which point I would hand them off to the nearest parent and run away. In fact, until I had Roshan, I had never even changed a diaper. Now, I’ve changed what feels like approximately five thousand. And suddenly, I’m the one being handed the baby when he’s crying, when no one else seems to be able to console him. Suddenly, I’m the parent, the port in the storm.
And it has changed me. I’ll find myself staring at my child in the middle of the night, marveling at the fact that my body grew another human. After a long fertility struggle involving doctors and needles and egg retrievals, I can’t believe it worked, and that he’s actually here. And every time it’s starting to feel like too much, something new will happen. Roshan will turn to me in the middle of a 3 am diaper change and give me a big, pure, toothless smile as if to say, “It’s okay, mama, we’re in this together.” It’s these moments that make this relentless stage of child-rearing feel worth it.
And all these newborn milestones have made me acutely aware of just how quickly time is passing. I am terrible at getting professional photos taken regularly, but a few days after his birth, in the haze of postpartum, I found myself scrambling to find a newborn photographer because I knew I needed to capture my son while he was still so tiny.
That’s how I found Ani and scheduled a newborn photography session with her when Roshan was just eleven days old. Today, her photos remain some of my most cherished possessions from this era…along with my trusty yoga ball and Merlin’s Magic Sleep Suit!"
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