Newborn Photos

Brown Bear's embrace

Penned Jan 30, 2025 by Penny Sue Denim (with revisions in Jun 2026)

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We had another big fight just after our second daughter’s birth. This one is etched in my memory. I had arranged newborn portraits for our little family on her sixth or seventh day, having arrived home from the hospital tired and stitched up.

Like most couples cradling a newborn, we were joyous, exhausted, and overwhelmed all at once.

As an experienced world traveler and a gifted photographer who was more comfortable behind the camera than in front of it, Robben typically sloughed off formal family portraits in favour of selfies taken at meaningful landmarks. But he was willing to subject himself to family portraits with each of our newborns. Perhaps, also, he sensed a certain amount of vanity in those posed photos, the kind of vanity, in this digital age, that would arguably be more gratifying to a wife/ mother than to a husband/ father.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Relieved that he had agreed to these portraits when he wouldn’t even agree to the purchase of our older daughter’s kindergarten school photos, I had made the arrangements. Getting ready for bed the night before, something set us off. Like most of our fights, I couldn’t possibly tell you what it was. Not now. Not, probably, a week after the incident. The starting point rarely had any great significance. The middle section tended to involve hurling of accusations, defensiveness, raging, and an altogether awful job of listening on both our parts. The climax, this time, was his announcement that he wouldn’t be going to the family portraits in the morning.

The final act of our disagreements typically involved me trying to whitewash the ways I had offended him during the fight. This time wasn’t much different. But, with the scheduled photography session quickly approaching, and several breastfeeding sessions “scheduled” in the interim, my efforts were more desperate than usual. After an excessive amount of tears, no doubt bolstered by the baby blues, I dove right into back-peddling, apologizing, and begging. In the end, he did attend those newborn portraits, which provided some of our most precious residual family images. But if you look real close into those two (or three or four) sets of eyes staring back at you, you’ll see reflections of resignation, dissatisfaction, and overall heartbreak. What you won’t see are traces of the puffy-eyed bathroom-mirror selfie I took the night before. If you were to compare those two images, taken less than twelve hours apart, you’d be mesmerized by the magic of make-up and the photoshopping skills of our expert photographer.

Photo by Oleksandr Skochko on Unsplash

Not long after this, feeling lonely, rejected, and overtaxed, I took a step towards admitting what I had been sensing for years: that my husband wasn’t capable of emotional availability. And so, I bought a teddy bear: a brown Gund named Philbin. Philbin’s sole purpose was to comfort an aching soul. Although my husband rarely withheld physical affection, I somehow needed Philbin’s substitute embrace for all those moments when, feeling deeply misunderstood and completely depleted with my arms monopolized by a newborn, my heart was falling apart.

~ ps denim

With accompaniment from My Unapologetic Playlist:

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