I Love Being a Mum But I Miss Me - Both Things Are True
There's a thought a lot of mothers have that almost nobody says out loud.
It usually arrives somewhere as you're just starting to emerge from that survival stage of motherhood. When you're no longer just trying to keep everyone alive and getting your head around some sort of attempt at a routine. And it sounds something like: I love this. And I feel like I've completely disappeared.
I had that moment at seven months, I was sitting on my bathroom floor in a towel, having just got out of the shower to feed my daughter because she couldn't wait the four minutes it would have taken me to finish. And when she finally settled, I looked up at the mirror and thought: who the hell am I? How is this my life now?
It didn't happen in some dramatic moment, which was almost what made it so confronting - it was just a completely ordinary day and even though I'd been feeling it creeping up for a while, for the first time, I genuinely didn't recognise the woman looking back at me.
If you've had a version of that moment - welcome (and honestly thank god it's not just me). What I now know is that you're not broken, you're not failing, and you're definitely not alone. There's actually a name for what's happening to you and what was happening to me.
Why losing yourself after having a baby isn't a you problem
The word is matrescence - the psychological, neurological, hormonal and identity-level transformation of becoming a mother. It was first named by anthropologist Dana Raphael in 1973 and has only really entered mainstream conversation in the last decade, which means most of us go through one of the most significant developmental transitions of our lives with absolutely no map and no language for it.
I certainly had no idea at the time, I didn't end up learning the word for years after that post-shower identity reckoning, let alone an understanding or a map.
Matrescence isn't just the adjustment period, it's not the baby blues or the postpartum fog or the general chaos of keeping a small human alive which most of us at least mildly expect to experience. It's the process by which you don't just have a baby, you also become someone new. And like most profound transformations, it involves losing a version of yourself before you can find the next one.
The problem is nobody prepares you for that part. Nobody prepares you for the grief of a self you didn't even know you were attached to until she started disappearing.
The thing that actually makes it hard
For me, the hardest part wasn't the exhaustion (though, fuck, the exhaustion). It was the invisible architecture of how I'd always understood my own worth and determined my value as a person - completely dismantled overnight.
Before I had my daughter, my sense of self rested on things I could point to like a finished project finished, a recognised contribution. It was usually work that other adults could see and name and respond to. I hadn't realised how much of my identity was built on external validation until I found myself in a world where the boss was a baby who couldn't give me a performance review, the work was constant and largely invisible, and a good day was measured by whether I'd managed to get dressed before eleven.
Cause those seemingly ridiculously small things became genuinely hard and they went completely unrecognised. And my brain, which had spent years running on external validation as a fuel source, had absolutely no idea what to do with that.
So I felt like my worth as a human had been quietly removed. Not really by my daughter but by the gap between what I was used to counting as contribution and what I was now doing every single day, which counted enormously and registered nowhere.
I carried that like a secret. Because to say it out loud felt shameful, like it would compromise everything I felt for her. Like the love and the grief couldn't coexist without one cancelling the other out.
What I didn't know then is that they can, and they do and they're supposed to (and have to).
The AND that changes everything
Here's what I know now, on the other side of it and as a maternal identity coach: the tension between loving motherhood and grieving yourself is not a contradiction or ingratitude and it's not a sign that something is wrong with you.
It's matrescence doing exactly what matrescence does.
The word that makes it survivable isn't but it's AND. I love being her mum AND I miss myself. I'm grateful AND I'm grieving. I wouldn't change this AND I would change this. Both sentences are true, not competing. They just need a conjunction that's big enough to hold them both and not causing them to compete or try to cancel eachother out.
Most of us spend months (sometimes years in my case) trying to resolve a tension that was never meant to be resolved. The moment you stop trying to pick a side and start letting both things be true at once, something shifts.
That's the work of matrescence. And it's available to every mother, whether she's seven months in or seven years in, whether she's in the thick of the newborn stage or sitting in the quiet wrongness of a life that looks fine from the outside and feels like someone else's on the inside.
Where to start
If any of this is landing (if you read something here and felt that specific exhale of oh, that's me) the Mothermorphosis Quiz is the best place to start.
It takes about four minutes, it's free, and it maps your experience across the five stages of maternal identity transformation and it'll give you a clearer picture of which part of your motherhood experience needs you most right now.
You don't have to figure this out without a map.
