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New baby and a happy dad.


When San Francisco photographer Lisa Robinson was about to have her second child, she was both excited and nervous.

Sure, those are the feelings most moms-to-be experience before giving birth, but Lisa's nerves were tied to something different.

She and her husband already had a 9-year-old son but desperately wanted another baby. They spent years trying to get pregnant again, but after countless failed attempts and two miscarriages, they decided to stop trying.


Of course, that's when Lisa ended up becoming pregnant with her daughter, Anora. Since it was such a miraculous pregnancy, Lisa wanted to do something special to commemorate her daughter's birth.

So she turned to her craft — photography — as a way to both commemorate the special day, and keep herself calm and focused throughout the birthing process.

Normally, Lisa takes portraits and does wedding photography, so she knew the logistics of being her own birth photographer would be a somewhat precarious new adventure — to say the least.

pregnancy, hospital, giving birth, POV

She initially suggested the idea to her husband Alec as a joke.

Photo by Lisa Robinson/Lisa Robinson Photography.

"After some thought," she says, "I figured I would try it out and that it could capture some amazing memories for us and our daughter."

In the end, she says, Alec was supportive and thought it would be great if she could pull it off. Her doctors and nurses were all for Lisa taking pictures, too, especially because it really seemed to help her manage the pain and stress.

In the hospital, she realized it was a lot harder to hold her camera steady than she initially thought it would be.

tocodynamometer, labor, selfies

She had labor shakes but would periodically take pictures between contractions.

Photo by Lisa Robinson/Lisa Robinson Photography.

"Eventually when it was time to push and I was able to take the photos as I was pushing, I focused on my daughter and my husband and not so much the camera," she says.

"I didn't know if I was in focus or capturing everything but it was amazing to do.”

The shots she ended up getting speak for themselves:

nurse, strangers, medical care,

Warm and encouraging smiles from the nurse.

Photo by Lisa Robinson/Lisa Robinson Photography.

experiment, images, capture, document, record

Newborn Anora's first experience with breastfeeding.

Photo by Lisa Robinson/Lisa Robinson Photography.

"Everybody was supportive and kind of surprised that I was able to capture things throughout. I even remember laughing along with them at one point as I was pushing," Lisa recalled.

In the end, Lisa was so glad she went through with her experiment. She got incredible pictures — and it actually did make her labor easier.

Would she recommend every mom-to-be document their birth in this way? Absolutely not. What works for one person may not work at all for another.

However, if you do have a hobby that relaxes you, figuring out how to incorporate it into one of the most stressful moments in your life is a pretty good way to keep yourself calm and focused.

Expecting and love the idea of documenting your own birthing process?

Take some advice from Lisa: "Don't put pressure on yourself to get 'the shot'" she says, "and enjoy the moment as much as you can.”

Lisa's mom took this last one.

grandma, hobby, birthing process

Mom and daughter earned the rest.

Photo via Lisa Robinson/Lisa Robinson Photography.

This article originally appeared on 06.30.16

Melissa Spitz's mother was institutionalized for the first time when Melissa was 6 years old.

Back then, Mrs. Spitz had just been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and as the years went by, her mental health continued to decline. She worked her way through a hysterectomy and cancer treatment, which led to alcohol abuse, a prescription pill problem, and, eventually, a divorce from Spitz's father.

"I was actually extremely fortunate and started seeing a therapist when I was 13. It was initially to deal with my mother’s recent cancer diagnosis, but naturally a lot came up," Spitz said. "As a kid it was chaos and nothing made sense. I empathize with her a lot more, but I really feel as if I am still putting all the pieces back together."


"The last time Dad remembers Mom being 'Normal,' Bumbershoot, Seattle, 1994." All photos by Melissa Spitz/You Have Nothing to Worry About, used with permission.

After her parents' divorce, Spitz turned to photography as a coping mechanism. But it wasn't until she got to art school that she turned the lens on her own mother.

One of Spitz's undergraduate photography projects at the University of Missouri involved documenting an element of her private life for class. There was no question that she'd be heading home to immortalize her mother's fragile state.

"By turning the camera toward my mother and my relationship with her, I capture her behavior as an echo of my own emotional response," she explained in her artist statement. "The images function like an ongoing conversation."

True to her mother's bipolar diagnosis, the resulting photo series, "You Have Nothing to Worry About," depicts a life of stark binary contrasts.

Spitz shoots candids as well as posed photos. Some images upset; others encourage. Some show the good parts of her relationship with her mother, and some show the bad.

Spitz passed the class, of course. But seven years later, she still hasn't finished the project. In fact, she plans to keep documenting her mother's struggle with mental illness as long as she's alive — for her mother's sake and for her own.

"Picture at home, 2015."

"It can be exhausting, but it is extremely cathartic," Spitz said.  "I really believe every image is just as much an image of me as it is of her."

"How can it not be?"

"We are both willing participants and both share the highs and lows of our relationship," she added.

"Mom doing her make-up, 2016."

Spitz eventually uploaded her photos to Instagram and found that the framed and fractured feel of the feed actually enhanced the experience of viewing the photos.

"I decided to try something new and started slicing my images and building these grids. It felt like the perfect opportunity to think about a social media platform in a different way," she explained.

The scattered chronology, varying photo sizes, and fragmented images that resulted made the photo series even more reflective of her mother's condition and their relationship.

A screengrab of Spitz's Instagram feed, showing a collage of the first portrait she took in 2009 (below) and shots from an exhibition where she displayed her photo "Quiet Please, 2016" in a similar fashion.

Instagram has also helped her vivid images to reach a wider audience — many of whom deal with similar problems.

Spitz's photographs don't just put the spotlight on her mother. They've also contributed to the larger conversation about mental health and helped to encourage people to share their own stories, often in the comments of her Instagram page.

"I have always wanted mental health to be treated the same way as physical ailments and that support for family members would be more readily available," Spitz said. "I hope my body of work and Instagram can be a small champion of this support system."

"Note from Adam to Mom, 2012," which inspired the name of the photo series.

Spitz has captured countless moments of bleak, honest beauty on camera. But she's seen her share of frights as well.

There are photos in the series of her mother's continued panic attacks, for example. Other photos show the huge regime of pills her mother relies on for stability and a B.B. gun, which her mother keeps "for protection."

"My brother and I have come to terms with the harsh reality that one day we will most likely be survivors of a suicide. It is our biggest fear," Spitz wrote in one particularly harrowing post, accompanying an image of her mother sprawled out on the carpet. She explained:

"When I used to live at home I hated unlocking the door, I constantly imagined her dead. As a kid I found my Mom laying on the kitchen floor, or bathroom floor multiple times. I remember her looking at me once and asking, 'Where’s Melissa?' She was so out if she couldn’t even recognize my face… I was 16."

Photography makes it easier for Spitz to cope and understand her mother. But it can't cure her mother's illness.

For all her struggles, her mother is moved by the power of her daughter's work — and she hopes that it can help other people, too.

"If I can help one person not feel alone, I am glad I’ve shared my story," her mother said.

When Spitz first embarked on her photographic journey, her mother was still living in the house that she had owned with her ex-husband and was still drinking heavily. But she was given a new voice just from seeing herself through her daughter's eyes. That empowerment helped lead her to quit drinking and to move into a new apartment.

Spitz's relationship with her mother is just one story of life with mental illness. But her willingness to share that hard story with the world is really important.

Not every case of bipolar disorder — or of difficult-but-loving mother-daughter relationships — looks the same. Even Spitz herself is careful to point out that her work is not intended as a blanket statement on mental health overall.

But at a time when mental illness is still constantly stigmatized, stories like these can open people's eyes and remind us that every family has their struggles and that everyone deserves compassion and support.

The other times will have their own meaning, with different value and depth, but when you meet your first child, it will be that very thing: the first time, never to be replicated again.

She will be impossibly small, and her chin will waver with an accusing uncertainty from the moment they place her warm body into your arms. How can you be my mother? You don’t look like you know what you’re doing.

And this will be true because, of course, you do not have the slightest clue.


You will assess the situation together, this first child and you. As a mother, you will notice the indentations where her knuckles should be, the rolls of fat that circle around her neck, her mottled skin and bald head. Improbably, she will seem insanely beautiful. Terrifyingly fragile.

She will hate the loudness of the room, the brightness of the lights. She will miss her old, wet burrow, with its cramped safe corners and dark shadows. Her furry brow will fold slowly. Then her unseeing eyes will blink up into the near space between the both of you, where you hold her close to your chest. Well, I guess this is it. We will have to make the best of it.

And then she will begin to cry. And you will begin to cry too.

In a day’s time, you will bring your daughter home and grow her up, in all the ways you know.

You will figure out how. She who knew from the beginning you never knew it all will regard you with purpose anyway.

She will do amazing things while you are worrying away the time. While you are cutting away the crusts. She will grow milk teeth and then grown-up ones. Someone named Mrs. Bastien will teach her cursive and make her learn which is the left hand and which is the right. She will save worms from baking on the sidewalk in the sun. She will love the things you hate and hate the things you love, and you will drive each other mad — all before she learns to drive.

Me and my daughter, Annabelle. Photo by Nicole Jankowski.

As her mother, you will do amazing things, too.

You will learn to need less: less sleep, less care, less time. You will give more. You will learn to tell the difference between "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" and "Mary Had a Little Lamb" on the recorder, but it will hurt. You will not say things you would almost always have said, just to keep the peace. What hard strength there is in the measurement of unsaid words. You will be in a hurry to get to the better times when the times are worn and exhausting. Then you will hold your breath and wish it would all just stop spinning, when you realize how quickly 5 years old became 10 and then 10 years old became 15.

You will cut your own teeth, sharply, on the mothering of this first child. You will do the worst job this first time. But it will be the purest experience, the one that lives forever in your gut. The one that makes you homesick, always, for the time when she did not know anything but you and it was all so very new and unfiltered.

It will be wonderful and terrible, heartbreaking and tumultuous. You will hate it sometimes, and you will love it. You will stand nearby and watch her figure out the balance of things with the eye of someone so simultaneously invested and so incredibly powerless. It will hurt you more than she can know.

Do not tell her how much it hurts.

One day you will be counting her fingers and her toes, and the next, you will see her looking off into some foggy distance and she will be smiling. It will be the first time you realize she is counting the days until she leaves you for her first adventure, all alone.

You have only minutes now, it seems, until she leaves the house for the last time with her bedroom door wide open. There are only fleeting ribbons of days and wispy years until the last time she goes — the time she goes away, when she won’t be coming back again.

For the very first time.

You might recognize Chris Hemsworth as the secretary in the upcoming "Ghostbusters" reboot, as the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Thor, or as the older brother of Miley Cyrus's sometimes beau, Liam.

But what you might not know is that the Australian god of thunder also has aspirations of culinary greatness and a 4-year-old daughter named India whom he dares not disappoint.

When his sweet little girl requested a chocolate T. rex cake to celebrate her birthday, the Mighty Hemsworth knew exactly what to do: order a cake from the cake store.

But life is not without its roadblocks, even for an in-demand leading man. We can’t say for sure if Hemsworth was hindered by the famously terrible L.A. traffic on the Rainbow Bridge to Asgard, or if he just waited too long to call the local bakery, but either way, the end result revealed the same shocking, awful truth: The cake store wouldn't have time to create the requested culinary dino-concoction in time for his daughter's birthday.

"What do you mean, you can't bake me a cake for my daughter's birthday? I'm $@ing THOR." — what the ever-friendly Chris Hemsworth definitely did not say. Photo by Anthony Kwan/Getty Images.

So Hemsworth swung into action, like a huntsman in that movie where he plays the huntsman.

Lest he return to his home empty-handed, Hemsworth consulted with Odin's great wisdom and found a recipe for such a cake as his daughter did desire.

With the knowledge of the Norns in hand, he got the the necessary ingredients from a store, just like a normal person who is also a father and wishes to do right by his daughter would do.

Photo by Torsten Laursen/Getty Images.

It was not until he returned to his humble Los Angeles abode that he realized he had forgotten eggs!

(OK so this part didn't actually happen. But I'm taking some creative license just so I can share this funny picture of an exasperated Chris Hemsworth.)

Photo by Alberto Alcocer/Getty Images.

With the clock ticking down toward the anniversary of his daughter's day of birth, the heroic Hemsworth grabbed the mixing bowl and fervently whisked the ingredients together and poured the batter blend into a dinosaur-shaped dish...

Tens of minutes passed as he anxiously awaited for the sugary mixture to settle into its spongy form within the oven...

Watching a cake bake is really, really boring, so here's a lovely photo of Chris and his wife, Elsa Pataky.

Photo by Samir Hussein/Getty Images for StudioCanal.

With seconds to spare (I'm editorializing), the kitchen timer sounded out an ear-piercing ding, and Hemsworth retrieved his Tyrannosaurus creation from the oven's fiery bowels!

He named his fine dino-delicacy "La TRex al la chocolate," which is a lost Latin phrase that I assume means "Chris Hemsworth made a totally awesome dinosaur cake for his daughter 'cause he's the man."

The lesson here is clear. Next time you're feeling stressed or overwhelmed, or afraid that you might disappoint the one you love, remember: It doesn't take a magical hammer or the power of the gods to bake a dinosaur cake.

Even a god of thunder can screw up and forget a simple task that he probably should planned for ahead of time. But as long as you remember that there's always room to improvise, even if it means you get your hands dirty in the name of love (and not to forget the eggs), you'll be just fine.