There is a particular loneliness in loving your child and missing yourself at the same time.
It is a loneliness many women apologise for. As if the missing were evidence that the loving is incomplete. As if gratitude were supposed to cancel the rest of a person.
I don’t believe that.
You can want motherhood and still question what has happened to your ambition, your marriage, your friendships, your body, your inner quiet. You can feel lucky and overwhelmed in the same afternoon. You can look at a baby you would not trade for anything, and still not quite recognise the woman holding them.
This is a transition, not a personality flaw
Pregnancy, postpartum, planning a child, or already being a mother can rearrange more than your calendar. It rearranges who you are allowed to be.
Some of that is beautiful. Some of it is simply a lot. And some of it is the quiet grief of an older self who has not been given a dignified place in the new life.
I have walked through pregnancy and motherhood while also knowing what it is to have had a professional identity, an inner world, and a version of myself that existed before this chapter. I do not think those earlier parts of you need to disappear in order for this one to be real.
The questions underneath the practical ones
Women often come with a practical question. Work. Support. A relationship that feels stretched. Sleep. Guilt. Whether they can still want a career they used to want without shame.
Underneath, there is usually something more intimate: who am I becoming, besides someone’s mother? Where have I gone missing? What would it mean to reconnect with myself without becoming less available to the people I love?
Those are not ungrateful questions. They are human ones.
How I want to sit with you in this
I will not pathologise a normal, complicated motherhood. I will not tell you that healing will restore a previous version of you as if she were a file we can reopen.
I will sit with the both/and of it. The love and the missing. The devotion and the restlessness. The gratitude and the need for a self that is still yours.
If this is the chapter you are in, you do not need a perfectly formed question. “I don’t feel like myself” is already enough for us to begin.