BUT YOUR BABY IS FINE.

"But your baby is fine.", is what I heard a lot after I gave birth to my first child, and of course that is what was important. It was not an overly dramatic birth, actually it was quite the norm. I planned an all natural birth and it developed into a c-section. So maybe I should just shut up and be happy because my baby is fine. Maybe its all because my generation is not used to those kind of experiences. Nevertheless, I needed to work through it, feel and understand what happened there. So I began to photograph myself and relive the hours of birth.

This photographic series explores the complex emotions surrounding childbirth when the experience diverges from expectations, and the subsequent dismissal of those feelings with the phrase "But your baby is fine." Through self-portraiture and staged compositions, the work creates a visual language for the often silenced emotional landscape of birth trauma and disappointment.

Each image examines an aspect of the birth experience - from the initial plans and hopes, through the medical interventions that felt like violations, to the aftermath of processing these experiences while simultaneously caring for a newborn. The series challenges the cultural narrative that maternal feelings should be subsumed beneath gratitude for a healthy child, arguing instead for the validity of holding both joy for the baby and grief for a birth experience that left emotional scars.

By making visible these typically private emotions, the work creates space for deeper conversations about maternal mental health, bodily autonomy, and the gap between idealized and actual birth experiences.