Parenting

Photos Of Parents Meeting Their Babies For The First Time Will Make Your Heart Explode

by Maria Guido

Birth photographer documents the “first moments”

Are there words to describe how it feels to look at your child for the first time? You may be at a loss. It’s a moment that’s too big to define with words. A photograph though? A photograph gives you “words” when you have none. Sometimes it’s the only way to truly get the emotion of a situation across.

Marry Fermont is a birth photographer, so she’s very familiar with that hard-to-describe first moment. “When you think of birth photography, you think of this moment,” she writes on her website. “The moment your baby is born. After all the hard work, after waiting for so long, you finally hold your baby in your arms… a birth session is not complete without a picture of that very first moment.”

“I was immediately drawn to this moment,” Fermont told Scary Mommy. “My first birth that I documented was May 6th 2011. I can remember it so vividly! I came home and I told my boyfriend in the middle of the night that I wanted a baby too. I told him there was so much love in the room that I thought I would be happy for the rest of my life just thinking about this moment. And it was true, documenting births is in some way addictive, because you feel so good afterwards.”

This is the that first image she was speaking about:

She’s right. You can feel the love just by looking at it. The joy is almost palpable.

She’s been photographing that moment ever since. She’s photographed 105 births in her career so far, and she captures that moment in a portfolio on her website called The First Moments. “There are so many emotions in this moment: joy, relief, amazement, pride, love, euphoria, contentment, and so many different reactions: smiles and tears,” she writes on her blog about the series. “Moments of silence and moments of extreme joy. Time after time after time, this is a magical moment, a moment in which you shed a tear yourself.”