Miss Who You Were Pre-Kids? How To Honor & Grieve Your Past Self

Being a mom of three has been both the biggest whittling down and yet the most expansive creative process of my life to date. Many of the past selves that I held—the academic at Berkley, the writer living in a flat in Argentina above a flower shop, the woman who horseback rides daily—no longer seem as vivid. 

The process of becoming a mother is often paved with some grief. Here, I am defining grief as the form love takes when someone you love leaves or dies. Grief is wanting for something that was, or never was. In the first few months after I had my baby, I lived with a spicy mix of having and wanting–having the togetherness, wanting the independence, having the sweetness, wanting the sexiness, having the exhaustion, wanting the restfulness. 

A lot of the parts of me that I used to embody were unpredictable, spontaneous, and forgetful, which is at odds with how I had to show up for my baby, so I put these parts down for a nap, and wondered who I was without them.  

The work of my motherhood journey has been differentiating between which parts of me died a wrongful death and need to be resurrected and which I can let live in the past.

This process of becoming/giving up is referred to as Matrescence: the physical, social, emotional, hormonal, tectonic shifts that one goes through after having a baby. 

In the pressure that parents feel to be grateful for our children, we lose the opportunity to mourn what we needed to give up in order to embody the role of caregiver. It’s a strange experience, to grieve when you get something you deeply wanted, like a child. But what I’ve learned is with every acquisition comes some kind of loss. As a psychotherapist and group facilitator, I notice that transitions, even the best ones, bring up three predominant emotions: anxiety, grief and fear. 

In dominant white American culture, most transition processes are not adequately recognized, as we are expected to move into our new roles quite quickly. Many people come into therapy and ask me, “How do I get over this ending [of a job, a death, a relationship]?” What I hear in this request is, “Can you help me stop the pain?” My answer is that we cannot stop it, but we can honor the hell out of it—this is how we move through it. 

The grief that can come in early parenthood is referred to as "disenfranchised grief," one that there is no funeral. When becoming a mother, I was ready to compromise my own needs, but I wasn’t prepared for how I would feel when the compromises (what a sanitary word!) felt more like confrontations with self and reckonings with loss. 

Loss looked like: When my hair started falling out at 4 months postpartum. The sadness that came when it was no longer me and my partner, but now there was a baby lying in bed between our bodies. 

No one talked about how confused I’d be when I looked at the breasts I’d known for over 30 years, that appeared unrecognizable after the milk dried up. How different sex would feel when estrogen dropped and prolactin rose. Or how I wouldn’t feel settled when I was with my baby, and I wouldn’t feel settled when I was without her. 

When I hold my baby at night, I squeeze her extra tight. I want her to feel so well loved that one day she resembles the kind of teddy bear that you know has been cuddled, and squeezed and snotted on. 

This is the type of intimacy I yearn for her to know, and yet this type of closeness requires me to put some of my selves on hold. There is honor in this privilege, and there is yearning in it. Both are equally important. 

The yearning that comes with grief often runs deep. When we grieve one part of our experience, it gets us in touch with all the other griefs we’ve lived through. To be her mother, I have to be in contact with how I wish I was mothered. I have to grieve not only lives I may not live in the future, but also lives I did not live before I became a mother. 

I must adjust my definition of a life well-lived—one that sometimes may be more meaningful than fulfilling. I have to be an adult, to step up, in ways I don’t want to, like pureeing food when I want to read, stop a juicy conversation to change a diaper, or pace the block over and over again with my baby in her stroller, so that we can both feel peace in moments of delightful separateness.

I remember learning about the Lebanese artist Huguette Caland, who left her husband and her three children in Beirut in order to prioritize her creative wellness and freedom. I thought, how courageous and how cowardly. 

How do we navigate the period of grief that comes with matrescence, making room for it in order to make more space for the joy that comes with any process of becoming? Here are 7 invitations: 

Respect the darkness: 

The exhaustion that comes with caring for a new human is real. You are giving so much, doing so much—and you are learning as you are doing, which requires double the energy. The hormonal fluctuations that come with the transition out of pregnancy, or into/out of breast feeding, bring tears, anger, and elation. 

New motherhood often feels like a rollercoaster at Disney world, “Woohoo! I got this” to “Oh no, what is happening!?” in a split second. As humans, we crave knowing; our brain seeks certainty and predictability to confirm safety. Yet, with new life comes a lot of unknowns. A friend once called the early months post-birth as “the dark days,” and I felt so seen. Almost like she gave me permission to feel into the darkness. Hiding impedes healing. If we want to move through the hard stuff, we have to face it, not deny it with compulsory positivity or hopefulness.

Take an inventory of what and who you have had to give up: 

Consider the identities you hold. Consider what parts of yourself you miss the most? How did she move? What did she look like? Where did she go? How did she spend her time? I invite you to pull out pictures of her, face her, hang her on your fridge as you do baby photos. Remind her you see her. And then notice what happens when you do.

Do not fetishize deep love: 

Our culture romanticizes motherhood, and yet what I know from experience is that all of my biggest loves have been complex, like tree roots that run deep, complex like the ocean floor. Beautiful, hard, tiring, questioning, exciting, dull, and more. All of this is fair in love. 

Wrestle with the idea of sacrifice: 

I have been continually shocked with how much I need as a mother. Sometimes I’ll have a half day to myself and then I’ll return home and notice that it wasn’t enough. Sometimes when we feel grief, it’s because we’ve given up more than we need to. 

Are you deferring so much to your little one, at the expense of having a self? Resentment is an indicator that you’ve gone past your limit—are you paying attention to your limits? Which aspects of what you lost in motherhood might you want to re-integrate? Experimentation is freedom—give yourself permission to try something, like skipping bedtime responsibilities, and then notice how you feel, what you gained, and if this experience is something you want to continue tinkering with.

Remind yourself that just as your baby is early in his/her/their development, so are you: 

Know that this negotiation between identifying what's right for you and what's right for your children is a normal part of the developmental journey as a parent and an essential part of the hard work of loving yourself and another at the same time. New things are not supposed to be easy. In fact, with each baby I’ve birthed, I’ve become a new woman. 

We must struggle (not to be confused with suffer) in any worthwhile process of becoming. I invite you to talk to the part of you that is struggling with this becoming, this grieving, and invite her to share her struggle with you and others who make you feel seen, soothed, and secure.

Give yourself permission to feel it all: 

Be bored. Loathe it. Regret it. Cry for it. Talk about it. Repressing the feelings leads to physical ailments, relational disconnects, and resentment. Be the mother that takes the risk and chooses truth over comfort on the playground. Don’t talk about strollers, talk about hair loss, sex loss, body changes, curiosities, and insecurities. 

Consider what you want your children to know about you/think of you: 

Looking into the future, consider what you want your children to say about you. What type of person do you want them to say you are? As a psychotherapist, I hear many mothers tell me that they teach their kids to go after their dreams, but don’t go after their dreams themselves. 

For me, right now, wrestling with the grief means being the woman that still goes dancing, but leaves the dance floor before she breaks a sweat, knowing that she needs to wake up with the sun and not be furious about it. 

It is saying no to friends who I love, so I can sit alone and witness my own imagination. It is choosing to go to the raising resilient girls roundtable over the concert of my favorite singers next week. It is hearing the sound of my baby crying in the backseat of the car, and increasing the volume on Simon & Garfunkel’s The Boxer, hoping it will soothe her, or drown her out, while simultaneously being worried it’s too loud and will impact her hearing. 

It is hearing more crying downstairs, and choosing to finish writing this sentence before tending to the tears, but not writing so many other sentences that still sit within me. Both/and, both/and, over and over again.