What Experience Teaches

I look tired in this photo. My hair is undone, my face shows every one of my years, and my grandson is doing what babies do best — resting securely on my lap as we read a book. I almost didn't share it.

That instinct is one I recognize immediately, because I hear it from clients all the time. Pregnant and postpartum people tell me they don't want photos taken because they feel puffy, exhausted, or unrecognizable to themselves. I understand that impulse. But I've come to believe the opposite is true: these are the moments most worth keeping. Not despite how hard or how tender they are, but because of it.

I came to this work first as a parent, long before I ever called myself a doula. I remember the particular exhaustion of new parenthood — the middle-of-the-night feedings, the body that didn't feel like mine anymore, the fierce and disorienting love that arrived all at once. Nobody prepared me for how physical the whole experience would be, or how much it would ask of me long after the birth itself was over.

Now I get to watch that same story unfold again, one generation over, as a grandparent. Holding my grandson, I see my own child's exhaustion and joy reflected back, and I recognize the exact expression that new parents wear when they're too tired to perform for a camera and too in love to care. That recognition changes how I show up for clients. I'm not just offering technique or timing or comfort measures. I'm offering the accumulated evidence of two generations that this hard, unglamorous, unphotogenic season passes — and that it's also the one you'll want to remember most clearly.

This is why I keep this photo close. Not because I look my best in it, but because it's true. Supporting people through pregnancy, birth, and new parenthood isn't about smoothing over the mess. It's about sitting inside it with someone, and letting them know you've been there yourself — as a parent, and now as a grandparent — and that they are not alone in it.

If you're expecting or newly parenting and dreading the camera, or dreading the whole unfiltered experience, I'd gently offer this: the beauty isn't in looking rested. It's in the life you're building, right there in the exhaustion.