Honolulu, Hawaii – I first discovered the significance of preserving our mothering journey back in 2000 when we had our first bellycast booth at the Hawaii Baby Expo. we started with just a few bellycasts and my first pregnancy portraits pasted on a trip-fold cardboard display. At that time digital photography had not yet seized the world and the maternity photography trend wasn’t a “thing”. I was actively working with pregnant moms doing birth work as a doula and midwifery student and had never seen pregnancy portraits or bellycasts on display anywhere before. I was excited to see what type of feedback we were going get from the experimental art we had been indulging in.
We were shocked by the response we got over our displays. Not so much by the young pregnant mothers but by the older women who flocked to our booth saying how they wished there had been something like that available when they were pregnant and that it had gone by so fast! Some of them literally had tears in their eyes as they were taken back to the memories of their own pregnancies by our artwork. I understood then that we don’t always recognize just how special what we’re experiencing in the moment is. We’re busy dealing with our day to day business, we take it for granted, we focus on our worries over the unknowns not realizing how beautiful our voluptuous bodies have become or just how precious those fleeting months of pregnancy really are.
The nostalgia our work inspired in these women and the sense of missing out they shared with us helped shape my understanding on the value of what we were doing – creating personalized art that would be a shared reminder of this time for years to come and more than that, helping women celebrate, and enjoy their journey into motherhood. Why did it elicit such strong feelings I pondered? A piece of art can inspire, creating good feelings of love and joy. Who doesn’t want to fill their home with visuals that will make them feel happy whenever they see it? When displayed in our homes inspirations like this go far in helping us through those rough days of parenting, reminding us why we started on that path in the first place. Down the road, once the chaos of raising children has passed that same art reminds us of the beautiful crazy journey we began so many years ago…
In the past 20 years it’s obvious that many other women now appreciate and love all the creative opportunities to create art centered around their mothering journey. Women today have made an amazing shift in their attitudes regarding pregnancy. No longer hiding their pregnant curves under tented shirts or blindly adhering to outdated concepts on mothering issues. They are proud and excited to participate in their motherhood passage. It’s an exciting time of empowerment for women that no doubt will lead to good changes for our future!
Please contact me if you’d like to chat about documenting your own mothering journey!