Ashley Graham Covers Harper's Bazaar UK July 2020 With Baby Isaac
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Top model and voice for women Ashley Graham covers the July 2020 issue of Harper’s Bazaar UK. Photographed by her husband, cinematographer Justin Ervin in and around her childhood home in Nebraska, the quarantined new mom reflects on her roots and life today, and pens a letter to her newborn son Isaac, born in January 2020.
One of the world’s most influential voices on body positivity, says that she was quite shocked over the changes she experienced in the early weeks of her pregnancy. Her initial response "I was so excited. I knew immediately I was going to be a great mom." soon became a psychological, emotional struggle with the changes in her own body.
"That was the wildest part. I thought, 'What about the things I’ve told myself? What about the affirmations I’ve gone through?' None of these mattered because my body was changing so rapidly. It really took me some time to figure it out mentally, because it was like there was an alien taking over my body." She thinks she has ‘pre-natal depression’. "When you go from laughing to crying in 30 seconds, you do wonder if you are OK. Unbeknown to me, that’s pregnancy,” Graham tells Lydia Slater.
"One of the best things I did for myself was to make pregnant friends, and then I realised I wasn’t alone, I was normal, and that calmed me down. I started to enjoy being pregnant in my third trimester."
Graham shares beautiful details of her home birth with two midwives and a doula and the earnest efforts of her husband of 10 years Justin Ervin’s earnest desire to be helpful.
We learn that Graham swung into activist action learning that coronavirus protocols in New York hospitals required women to give birth alone. "If I hadn’t had my midwives or even Justin in the room, the whole experience would have been a very different one for me.,” Ashley explains regarding her new mom outreach to New York’s governor Andrew Cuomo, who subsequently signed an executive order allowing all women living in the state to have a partner in the delivery-room.
Graham closed out her maternity leave and returned to modeling as COVID-19 swept through New York City. With her mother Linda in Brooklyn to help with the baby, the plan to decamp to the family home in Nebraska "She said, 'It’s 20 hours, let’s just go and I’ll drive all the way.'"
The family rolled out of Brooklyn on Friday, March 13, driving the 1,300-mile journey through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Iowa. Linda kept her promise driving 16 hours straight, before Justin takes the last four, turning off the ignition in Lincoln, Nebraska around midnight Saturday.
The shoot became a family affair, and Graham is generous with the details. She also includes the special letter written for her baby son — an irreplaceable gift to him, one that he will surely treasure even more as a young man.
