Strong as a Mother

I spent a morning photographing Kelly's Mum & Baby class at Santé Fitness, and I have not stopped thinking about it since.

I want to tell you what I saw, because I don't think enough people talk about this properly.

What was actually happening in that room

A woman doing squats with a baby on one hip and a Peter Rabbit book held open in the other hand, because that was the only thing keeping her happy. She didn't stop. She didn't apologise. She just did the whole set one-handed, reading about a rabbit.

A woman pressing a weight overhead while her toddler lay face down on the mat beside her, entirely unbothered, driving a toy aeroplane along the floor.

A baby who spent most of the class chewing on a resistance band, absolutely delighted with himself, while his mother finished what she was doing.

Buggies lined up along the back wall. Sippy cups rolling across the floor. Muslins draped over everything. Somebody's dolly abandoned face down next to a kettlebell.

And laughing. Constantly. I have honestly never photographed a room with that much laughing in it.

Nobody was performing

This is what struck me hardest, and it's why the photographs work.

Nobody had done their hair. Nobody was posing. Nobody was doing that thing people do when a camera appears, where they suddenly stand differently and pull their shoulders back.

They were too tired, and too busy, and frankly too occupied with a small person trying to eat a resistance band.

Which meant I got to do the thing I actually love, which is stand at the edge of a room and photograph what is genuinely happening.

What postpartum strength actually looks like

Not a before and after. Not a bounce-back. Not a body being "got back", as if it had wandered off somewhere and needed retrieving.

It looks like squatting with eight kilos of baby on your hip.

It looks like holding a position while a one-year-old climbs onto your back and treats you as furniture.

It looks like getting through a full hour on four hours' sleep, in a room where you don't have to explain any of it.

And here's the thing I keep coming back to.

The first months after a baby arrives are the months when you are least likely to do anything at all for yourself, and the months when you most need to. You are exhausted. You are touched out. You have probably not had a conversation with another adult all week that wasn't about feeding, or sleeping, or whether that's normal.

Getting out of the house with a baby is hard enough. Getting out of the house with a baby, in leggings, into a room full of other people, when your body has not long done the most enormous thing it will ever do, is not a small act.

It's a brave one. And I don't think anybody ever tells you that.

I need to tell you about Kelly

Kelly runs the Mum & Baby class. She's also my best friend, which means I've watched her build this from very close range, and I've never seen anyone put more of themselves into anything.

The class isn't really about the squats. There are squats, and by the end everybody's shaking. But that isn't what it's for.

It's for the woman who hasn't left the house in four days.

It's for the one who's been told to get her body back, usually by somebody who has never grown an entire person from scratch.

It's for the one who is fine, actually, thank you, and would simply like to be in a room with other adults for an hour without having to justify herself.

What Kelly has built is a place where you can turn up with your baby, and your mess, and your terrible night, and nobody minds. Where nobody is looking at what you look like. Where if your baby screams for the full hour, that's fine, and somebody will hold him while you finish.

Safe, warm, and properly fierce. Which is exactly what she's like.