The Self After

On the identity that disappears when you become a mother, and the one that slowly comes back.

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I wrote this essay in early January. I’ve had it slated on my content calendar to be published this week in July since the beginning of the year. It sort of randomly coincides with the BIG announcement I made yesterday on Instagram. And I feel like the essay is somehow now even more relevant than ever. I hope it resonates. Big hugs.

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A few months ago I wrote about what happened to my body after becoming a mother. But there’s something else I’ve been sitting with that’s been harder to name. Harder than the physical changes, harder than the soft belly or the pancake boobies or the stranger in the mirror. What I wasn’t prepared for, what caught me completely off guard, was the loss of who I was.

Not just feeling different. Feeling gone.

For the last ten years, my life has been built around a very specific kind of freedom. I didn’t have a traditional job. I didn’t have a 9 to 5 or a boss or a schedule someone else made for me. My work came from me, from sharing what I was passionate about, from the things I was learning and eating and making and thinking about. Specifically in relation to well-being. My life and my work were the same thing, and the center of both was me.

I had a beautiful morning routine. I had long stretches of uninterrupted time. I had the ability to say yes to things on a whim and go where I wanted and change my mind without it affecting anyone else. Time felt so generous. There was just so much of it, and it was all mine, and I was really used to that. Ten years of that. A decade of investing in myself spiritually, emotionally, professionally, physically, because that was both my life and my livelihood.

I think when you haven’t gone through it, motherhood can feel romantic. Especially on the internet, especially on Instagram. You see these curated moments, the golden hour photos, the muslin swaddles, the peaceful feeding shots, and those moments do exist. They’re real, and they’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever experienced. But it’s easy, without having lived it, to idealize the whole thing. To imagine yourself inside it without imagining what it actually asks of you. I did that. I romanticized it. I thought I’d be the same person, just with a baby. I didn’t see the loss coming.

The first few months were a blur. The euphoric haze of sleep deprivation, the hormones, the constant feeding, the complete reorganization of every hour. And then one afternoon, maybe around month three, I looked down at myself and something clicked into focus. I was sitting on the couch in sweatpants and my pumping bra and my bathrobe, attached to my breast pump. It was 2:30 in the afternoon. I couldn’t remember if I had washed my face. I couldn’t remember anything I had done that day besides feed my baby. And I just thought, “Whoa. Who is this person?”

Not in a cute, self-deprecating way. In a real way. Like I genuinely did not recognize my own life.

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My brain was mush. My thoughts wouldn’t connect. I was tired in a way that went deeper than physical exhaustion. I wasn’t connected to my body. I wasn’t connected to my ideas. I was in survival mode, truly, just getting through each day. And of course all of it was peppered with these enormous, heart-expanding moments of getting to know my son, watching him discover his hands, hearing his first laugh, feeling him fall asleep on my chest. Those moments are real too. But they don’t cancel out the other thing. They exist alongside it.

The thing I missed most was my fierce sense of independence. The ability to make a decision and just go. To not have to think about how every choice affects this tiny person who is completely reliant on me. I love that he needs me. And I missed the version of myself who only had to think about what she needed.

But the hardest part, the thing that was harder than any physical change, was losing my creative self. That’s the thing I didn’t expect to grieve. For ten years, my creativity was the engine of everything. It’s how I built my work, how I processed the world, how I made sense of my life. And when Tedros arrived, all of that energy went somewhere else. It went into birthing, into breastfeeding, into the sheer act of keeping this new life going, into finding a rhythm with a role I’d never played before. That is its own form of creativity, I know that now. But it didn’t feel like it at the time. It felt like my creative self had packed a bag and left without saying goodbye.

A body is a body. You learn to adapt. You find new ways to dress, new ways to feel at home in your skin. But a loss of identity is something else entirely. It’s waking up and not knowing who you are outside of this one role. It’s reaching for the version of yourself you’ve known your whole adult life and finding nothing there.

I talked about it a little with some friends, but never in full depth. I think it’s something the majority of mothers face and very few of us say out loud. Because there’s this unspoken rule that you’re supposed to be so grateful for your baby that the grief of your former self feels selfish. It’s not. Missing parts of your old life is not a betrayal of your new one. Loving who you were and loving who you’re becoming can happen at the same time. I think it has to.

My son is fifteen months now, and I want to say it gets better, because it does. Slowly, and then suddenly, and then slowly again.

It came to a boiling point for me in January. I stepped away from Instagram because I felt like I needed to find my creativity somewhere that wasn’t a grid. I started The Artist’s Way and let myself be a beginner again. I started writing in a way that felt more like me. I started cooking with intention again. Small things, but they added up.

I also got honest about what I needed. I asked for help. I let myself use child care without guilt. I carved out time that was just mine and protected it, because I finally understood that being a good mother doesn’t mean being a dissolved one. My independence is coming back, but it looks different now. It’s less about freedom from responsibility and more about knowing myself well enough to take what I need so I can show up fully for my son, for my work, for the life I’m building.

I think in the beginning, when you’re in the thick of it, it’s so hard to know which way is which. There’s no map for the loss of self. No one hands you a guide that says you will feel like a stranger in your own life and here’s how to come back. You just stumble through it. And the stumbling is part of it.

If you’re in it right now, if you’re reading this in the middle of a day where you don’t feel like yourself and you’re not sure who you are anymore, I want you to know: it’s not permanent. You’re not broken. You didn’t lose yourself. You’re just in the middle of becoming someone you haven’t met yet.

And she’s worth meeting. I promise.

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