‘‘Go home and enjoy your baby.”

In 2022, my daughter was born with extreme and unexpected blood loss. She was immediately taken to the NICU and I spent hours alone, unsure whether she was alive. Elowen went on to make a full recovery but the trauma of her birth and our separation left an indelible mark. While profoundly grateful for her survival, I found myself navigating deep grief as I mourned the loss of being unable to hold her during her first breaths and welcome her fully to the world. 

The Golden Hour in neonatology was adopted from adult trauma management where the first 60 minutes after an injury is seen as the most crucial in determining a person’s outcome. It is meant to highlight the importance of those first moments between mother and child, particularly concerning skin-to-skin contact immediately after birth. The almost mythic status of the Golden Hour is so present in the Western narrative of birth that we are led to believe that if this sacred window is somehow missed or disrupted, the foundation of a mother-child dyad might be irrevocably altered. The common advice at discharge is to ‘Go home and enjoy your baby’ without acknowledgement that something seminal has been lost. In the following months after my daughter’s birth, we lived in the unknown; unsure of what her birth would mean for her long-term health. As I held my breath with every milestone reached, I thought back to that Golden Hour, what it should have looked like and what its absence meant for other mothers beyond those missing hours.

The Hardest Hue to Hold is an intimate exploration of the complex emotions mothers experience when separated from their babies at birth. The series is a poignant account of the resilience of mothers, a celebration of the continuation of life, beauty found within the unknown and light found in the darkest hours.

Note: The title ‘The Hardest Hue to Hold’ is inspired by Robert Frost’s 1923 poem Nothing Gold can Stay.