How to Find Yourself After Motherhood

By Jami Ingledue — BEHIND DOMESTIC LINES

When we have kids, it’s like we, as people, disappear into the vastness of motherhood. We are completely subsumed by their enormous need for us, which fills our whole world and pushes everything else out past the edges. Everything else, even basic survival things like sleeping and eating and peeing, is eclipsed by their endless need, like an exploding star that immediately covers our entire universe.

Where do we go? Are we still there, underneath the debris? For me, it felt like sometimes I had been scattered to the universe by that exploding star, and would never be able to collect all the pieces again.

I remember talking about this with a wise mother and grandmother — how I didn’t seem to enjoy the things I used to enjoy, didn’t want to do the things I used to love. I was just so tired, and when I had any scraps of time I just wanted to rest. “You’ll come back to yourself,” she replied.

I did not know I would lose myself. I was not prepared for the disappearance.

Self-care is simply coming back to ourselves. It’s remembering, after we come out of the exhausted fog of diapers and night feedings, that we have a self in there still, and that we have needs too. That our needs are just as important as everyone else’s, and there is a cost…