Honoring the Postpartum Transition with Ceremony + Documentary Photography

“[Postpartum] is a time and place apart from the outside world and life as you once knew it”   

Heng Ou

The postpartum transition is an incredibly tender time.  

Tender like the softness of your belly

Tender in the potential for a level of love so intense it feels like heartbreak

Tender in feeling disconnected from who you were

Tender in the the newness, in the learning

Tender in the sleeplessness, in the uncertainties, in the fear

Tender like sitting on an inflamed hemorrhoid

Tender like a newborn babe

In the challenge of this tenderness is a time truly life changing.  It’s something worth honoring with gentleness, with loving support, healing food, ceremony (a way of honoring and integrating into this new aspect of your identity as a mother, which in the postpartum period–is the all encompassing work) and memorialization.  

One ceremony I like to offer is swaddling the mother.  I learned this from the wonderful postpartum doula, Shelly Rahim, and it has roots in the ancient practice of “closing the bones.”  The mother receives a loving massage, a heat pack is placed on her womb, and she is tightly tucked into bed, like a baby in a swaddle.  This simple and sweet ceremony acknowledges that she is a newborn mother worthy of care, while helping her to feel held and grounded in the vulnerable airiness of postpartum.  It is an opportunity to give thanks for this amazing body that was able to grow, birth, and now nurture her baby.  It is an opportunity to be still, to pray, to sleep, to cry–to just be in this moment and in this new reality.  

The postpartum transitions of coming back home into your body, of learning how to meet your baby's needs, to get rest when you can, to reorganize life as you have known it--These changes demand us to slow down and let this bubble of home life be the whole world for the time being.

What if in addition to ceremony, we could also honor this transition by memorializing it in all of it's messy beauty? This is something many of us have seen done with birth photography which captures the story of a mother's labor and birthing in the raw honesty of it. Have you seen documentary style postpartum photography that similarly captures the raw honesty of life begun again postpartum?

My friend and photographer, Christina Cho Serrano, is now offering documentary style family photography to capture this intimate and sacred time.  She is a homeschooling mother of 2 who loves to capture images of motherhood and family life in their authenticity.

Here is an example of a session she did with me and my family when my babies were 5 and 2.  She came and hung out with us for 3 hours while we went about our slow Saturday morning.  In between chatting about our day and sharing our morning with her, she snapped these beautiful candid photos of us, just being a family.  No staging, no perfectly aesthetic kitchen, just a plan to make breakfast.

Knowing how vulnerable of a season postpartum is, it may seem risky to invite this level of intimacy in. I get that. That is why, Christina and I are partnering to offer this as a doula support add on. I take pride in the level of trust I foster with my doula clients when they invite me into such an intimate part of their journey. And just like I get to know my clients before I show up in the intimacy of birth, Christina gets to know her clients before showing up in the intimacy of postpartum life. And that is at whatever stage of postpartum feels right to you. It has been said that you are postpartum as long as you are up at night and your baby is in diapers. Just imagine honoring your journey as a newborn mother and family in this way.

And this offer stands for those past clients who are further down the road on their parenting journey like we were in the above photos. Each stage of parenting is special and unique.

I am very excited to share this special offer! Please reply to this email for more information.