I've been reflecting a lot on truths lately and it's time I put mine in writing. The truth is - I almost didn't do this. I almost talked myself out of it a hundred times. And some days, I still can't believe I actually jumped.
For ten years, I was a dental hygienist. I was good at it. I cared about my patients. I showed up, I worked hard, and I built a life around the stability of it. On paper, it made sense.
And then I had my first child. And everything changed.
The Thing About Becoming a Mother
When our first daughter was born, I became obsessed with photographs in a way I couldn't explain and didn't try to. Every newborn curl of the fist. The way the morning light landed on a sleeping face. The impossible smallness of her nose to her toes. I photographed relentlessly, not because I thought I was talented, but because I was terrified of forgetting.
Motherhood does that. It makes you viscerally aware of how fast everything is moving, how little you can control and no matter how hard you try to hold onto a phase its gone before you've even finished feeling it. My camera became the way I slowed time down. Or at least, the way I tried.
When our second baby came into the world, I remember sitting in the hospital the morning after delivery, completely overwhelmed and completely in love, holding this tiny person who smelled like something I had no words for. I took a photo. I couldn't stop looking at her, trying to carve all her little details into my memory, and then I cried. Not from sadness but from the weight of knowing that this was what mattered. Not the appointment schedule waiting for me back at the dental practice. My girls.
The Second Time Hits Different
I know it's a cliché. But it was true for us.
Becoming a mother for the second time is its own kind of undoing. There were exceptional circumstances in our lives beyond our control, things we couldn't prepare for and I had to give up a little bit of that control. Layered underneath all of it was something no one really talks about: the hardest part of having a newborn the second time isn't the newborn. It's your toddler.
There is something so uniquely terrifying about doing something for the first time even when you've technically done it before. Because the second time, you know more. You know how fast it goes. The only constant is change. Which is comforting in the hard stages, heartbreaking in the fun ones. And your toddler, this little person who was your whole world just yesterday, is now standing at the edge of something enormous, trying to make sense of it too.
Now, that toddler is seven. She is a bright, tender, complicated little person navigating new things with the same quiet anxiety I've carried my whole life. She hesitates at the edge of firsts. She needs a moment before she can leap.
And here's the part I want to admit carefully, because I mean it: I think that's beautiful. Not something to fix. Beautiful. Because watching her taught me something I couldn't have learned any other way. That my own fear of firsts, my own hesitation at the edge of things, was never a flaw. It was just part of how I'm made. And the most extraordinary gift I have ever been given is the chance to learn that about myself through the two most beautiful things I have ever created.
They didn't just push me toward this work. They showed me who I actually am.
Why I Stayed Anyway - And Why I Finally Left
I want to be honest about this part because I think it's the part that most people who are standing at a similar crossroads need to hear: I stayed out of fear. Plain and simple.
Fear of instability. Fear of opening myself up to judgment what would my colleagues think? My family? My friends? Fear of failure in a field I hadn't been formally trained in. And underneath all of it, the most suffocating fear of all: the fear that maybe I wasn't actually good enough, and that staying put was just a more dignified way of never having to find out. And any parent knows, juggling the daily is hard enough as it is. It would have been easy to stay. I loved my career but it always felt like my heart was pulling in another direction. Even an out-of-tune piano can play a beautiful song.
My children dismantled that fear slowly, the way children do everything. Gradually, and then all at once. They just kept growing. Kept reaching milestones I couldn't get back. My oldest started school. My youngest learned to walk. And I kept thinking: I am missing this. Not physically. I was there. But mentally, emotionally, I was always half somewhere else. I was growing too. I was learning who I was now because the 18 year old me who chose a career out of a check list rather than following my heart was just not who I was anymore.
The day I finally decided to leave dental hygiene wasn't dramatic. The honest truth is that I didn't leave cleanly. For years, I lived in both worlds at once, building my photography business while quietly keeping my hygiene license current, just in case. Just in case it didn't work. Just in case I needed to go back. It was my safety net, and I held onto it the way you hold onto something you're not sure you're ready to release.
Half of me was behind a camera. The other half was still in scrubs, still accountable to a version of myself I wasn't sure I was allowed to outgrow. This year, I let go. I retired my license. Fully, finally, without a backup plan. I won't pretend it wasn't terrifying. But there's a particular kind of freedom that only comes when you stop leaving yourself a way out and when you decide that the life you're building deserves your whole self, not just the half you can spare.
I was done settling for a life that looked responsible from the outside while something inside me was quietly suffocating. I didn't just want more. I needed it. For myself, yes. But more than anything, for my girls. Because I couldn't spend my days teaching them to be brave while I was too afraid to move.
What Dental Hygiene Actually Taught Me
Here is the thing I couldn't have anticipated: I didn't leave dental hygiene empty-handed. Without realizing it, I had spent ten years building exactly the skills that newborn and maternity photography demands most.
Attention to Detail — The Kind That Protects
In dental hygiene, your eyes are trained to catch the things that matter before they become problems. A millimeter matters. What looks small on the surface can mean everything underneath. That precision transferred directly into how I see a frame. In family and motherhood photography, the details are where the whole story lives the way a mother's hand curls around her child's without thinking. The way a toddler leans in, just slightly, toward the person they feel safest with. The tired love on a face that doesn't know it's being watched. These are the things that get lost if you're not trained to look for them. I was. I'd been practicing that kind of seeing for a decade before I ever picked up a camera professionally.
Building Trust With Clients Who Are Vulnerable
Think about what it takes to get someone to relax in a dental chair. They're often anxious, sometimes in pain, and entirely dependent on you to handle them with care. I learned how to be a calm, steady presence in moments of vulnerability. Now think about your first days postpartum, exhausted and tender and still figuring out what in the world just happened. Or a couple at 36 weeks, nervous and excited and overwhelmed. The skill is identical: meet people exactly where they are. Don't perform warmth: actually feel it. Create safety before you create anything else. Ten years in a dental chair taught me that more deeply than any photography course ever could.
Patience That Comes From the Bones
Family sessions are beautifully, gloriously unpredictable. A toddler who was perfectly happy five minutes ago is now face-down on the grass. A mother who felt confident getting dressed this morning suddenly can't remember how to stand. A dad who swore he was fine is visibly stiff the moment a camera appears. You cannot force any of it. You wait. You make a joke. You get down on the ground. You follow the child instead of directing them, and you trust that the real moment is coming it just needs space to arrive. That quality of patience, the kind that is genuinely unbothered by chaos, is not something I learned in a photography workshop. I learned it across ten years of sitting with people in their most anxious, vulnerable, unguarded moments and simply being steady for them. Patience in this work isn't passive. It's the whole job.
What This Work Means to Me Now
I photograph families and mothers for the same reason I started photographing my own children: because these moments are ordinary and holy all at once, and they are gone so fast it genuinely takes your breath away if you let yourself feel it.
A child grabbing their parent's face with both hands. A family piled together on a Sunday morning, completely themselves. I am not staging those moments. I am just close enough to catch them. And when I do when the light is right and nobody is performing and something real just happens in front of my lens, that's about the closest I feel to my heart singing.
Am I still learning? Every single day. Do I still second-guess myself? The settings, the pose, the moment I chose to press the shutter instead of wait? Constantly. But I can say this with everything I have: I have had the time of my life doing it. And I wouldn't trade a single uncertain, imperfect, heart-full moment of it.
Ready to Preserve Your Story?
I would be so honored to photograph your family during this tender, fleeting season. Let's talk.
