The mom photographer - photoshoot after photoshoot

Why I stepped in front of the camera after becoming a mom

Luke was born in September 2020.

Three days later, Jeff’s mom passed away after six weeks in the hospital battling Guillain-Barré Syndrome.

Seventy-one days later, his grandmother—another beautiful woman in our life—also passed into glory.

And just days after that, I got the results from my oncology bloodwork.

It was terrifying.

The number that shattered my peace

With Medullary Thyroid Cancer, two markers are always tracked:

CEA (a common cancer marker) and Calcitonin (specific to MTC).

My Calcitonin levels had spiked—like through the roof—higher than they had ever been.

It felt like a gut punch.

Like I had been handed this miracle, this prayed-for child…and now I might not live long enough for him to remember me.

We had always known pregnancy was a gamble—there’s almost no research on how MTC behaves in pregnancy.

But this bloodwork made it feel like that gamble had tipped. I suddenly had questions no one could answer:

Did I just give birth to a child who will never really know me? Did pregnancy speed up my cancer? Was this the beginning of the aggressive phase?

Answers wouldn’t come for a month.

And that month changed everything.

Legacy, in real time

Every moment with Luke felt like holy ground.

I wasn’t sure if I would ever get to do this again.

I wasn’t sure if I’d live long enough to see him grow up.

So I started preserving everything.

I took photos every day—with my iPhone, my DSLR, whatever was in reach.

I set up full-on photoshoots with him and me together—not because I was feeling creative, but because I needed to leave something behind.

I wrote him a song.

I sang it to him every night (I still sometimes do to this day).

And I recorded it—just in case one day I couldn’t sing anymore.

I wasn’t trying to be sentimental. I was trying to survive with meaning.

Trying to be the mom who wasn’t only behind the camera.

Because unless you have a husband who’s amazing at catching the in-between moments, 90% of the photos of moms with their babies end up being selfies.

I didn’t want Luke’s childhood to be made of selfies.

I wanted him to see how I looked at him.

How much I loved him.

The results that gave me room to breathe

When the scans finally came back, they were reassuring.

No new tumors.

No clear signs of disease progression.

And over the next six months, the Calcitonin numbers slowly began to drop again.

To this day, no one fully understands why that spike happened.

But through that experience, we’ve learned this strange pattern:

My cancer responds well to pregnancy... and negatively to the end of pregnancy—whether by birth or miscarriage.

This is my "mom photographer" era

I didn’t set out to become “the mom photographer.”

I became her because I was trying to hold onto what felt like it might slip away.

Somewhere in the middle of the grief, the lullabies, and the never-ending photoshoots, I started to see what legacy really is.

It’s not curated. It’s not posed. It’s presence.

Luke won’t remember those first months.

But he’ll have the photos. And the song.

And I hope he’ll always know how fiercely he was loved—even when I was afraid.

Why It Matters

That’s why I invite other moms into the frame.

Because if you’re like most of us, many of your photos with your kids are selfies—and the rest are probably missing you altogether.

You don’t need a perfect session to be remembered.

Have me come for a baking day.

A bedtime routine.

A regular Tuesday afternoon in your living room.

I’ll simply be there—photographing the love that’s already there.

So your kids have more than selfies.

They have you.