You’re Not in the Pictures. And You Won’t Remember All of It.
There’s a conversation I keep having.
It starts differently every time.
Sometimes in a design consultation, sometimes in a casual exchange with a mom I’ve just met.
But it always arrives at the same place.
A woman telling me, matter-of-factly, that there are no pictures of her. Not as a complaint. As a statement of fact. Like it’s just the way things are.
And in a way, it makes sense.
Moms are the default documentarians.
We’re the ones with the phones out, making sure everyone else is in the frame. We capture everything. We just have a habit of stepping out of our own story while we do it.
The Cost of Disappearing
I was talking recently with a client during her Design Consultation for a Postpartum Project session. She told me she actually works very hard not to hide from the camera.
She’s seen what it costs. She knows women who can’t find a single photograph of themselves from entire years of their lives.
She decided that wasn’t going to be her.
I thought about that for a long time after we hung up.
Because I understand both sides of it. I’ve recently hit perimenopause and my face has been breaking out in a way I haven’t dealt with since middle school.
The last thing I want right now is to be in front of a camera. But I also know I don’t regret it when I do it anyway.
We are always our own worst critics. And hiding does us a disservice we won’t fully feel until later.
When my mom passed in 2020, we went looking for photographs of her to use at her funeral.
For certain stretches of her life, they just weren’t there. That part of her was missing from the record. I can’t tell you how much that hurt, not just in the grief of losing her, but in the specific grief of not being able to find her in those years.
Think of photographs as modern-day journal entries. Tangible proof that you were there, that you showed up, that you made an impact. When you’re not in them, it’s like that chapter of your story happened without you.
Showing up in front of a camera isn’t about vanity. It isn’t about looking good.
It’s about making the deliberate, sometimes difficult choice to exist in your own story.
For yourself, and for the people who will go looking for you someday.
You Won’t Remember All of It
Here’s the other part of the same conversation that stayed with me.
She mentioned, almost in passing, that she has the memory of a goldfish. And that’s one of the reasons she wanted to do the Postpartum Project.
Not for her kids, not for legacy, not for what she’d leave behind someday.
She wanted to do it so she wouldn’t lose the experience to herself. So she could hold onto her own story while she’s still living it.
That’s a different reason than I usually hear. And it’s the truest one.
The postpartum chapter is more than just the newborn phase.
It’s years of becoming someone new. Years of growing into the woman you are meant to be, and then looking up one day and realizing you don’t quite remember how you got there.
Memory is unreliable by design.
The details that feel permanent right now are the first ones to go.
The baby sounds. The small fingers. The way those early years actually felt from the inside.
We tell ourselves we’ll remember. We don’t. Not all of it.
Not the way we want to.
What You Can Do About It
The interview is a memory tool in a way that nothing else quite replicates.
Hearing yourself say your story out loud, on the record, is different from a journal entry or a photograph alone.
It puts your voice in the room with your story. It becomes something you can return to.
And the printed image does something a phone gallery can’t.
There’s something about seeing yourself on your own wall – in an album, in a frame, in art you chose to live with – that takes you back to exactly who you were in that moment.
Every time I walk past mine, it makes me stand up a little straighter.
It’s evidence. Of showing up. Of the chapter you lived.
Of yourself.
Your kids will see it too. And they will love it. Not because it’s perfect, but because you’re in it: present, visible, documented.
That’s what they’ll carry.
The Invitation
If any part of this is landing for you, I don’t want you to file it under someday.
Someday is how the details get lost.
The Postpartum Project is a raw portrait interview experience in Chapel Hill, NC, for any woman who has birthed a child – new moms and experienced ones alike.
It’s not about the highlight reel. It’s about the real story, preserved in your voice, your face, and imagery worthy of your walls.
If you’re ready to stop waiting, book a Postpartum Project Curiosity Call by filling out the form below.
Your story deserves to be preserved. Before the details fade and the memory goes with them.