There’s a photo of me from before. Before the minivan, before the school calendars, before I started buying things in bulk and knowing instinctively which child prefers the blue cup. In the photo I’m laughing at something off-camera, hair loose, completely unaware of what’s coming.
I look at that woman sometimes and feel two things simultaneously: a deep tenderness for her, and the faint, unsettling realization that I’m not entirely sure who she was.
Motherhood has a way of doing that. It doesn’t erase you — it’s more subtle than that. It reorganizes you. Quietly, over years, in a thousand small moments of putting yourself second, third, last. One day you reach for something that used to define you — a hobby, a dream, a personality trait — and it’s still there, but it fits differently now. Like a coat you love that no longer quite closes.
I used to know exactly what I wanted. What I liked. What made me feel like me.
Now I sometimes have to think about it.
I’ve heard the question asked in hushed tones at playgroups and in the margins of late-night texts between mom friends: “Do you ever feel like you lost yourself?” It’s always said carefully, almost apologetically, as if wanting yourself back is somehow a betrayal of the people you love most.
But I’ve been sitting with a different question lately.
Not “did I lose myself” — but “who, exactly, am I trying to get back to?”
Because here’s what I’ve noticed: the woman in that photo? She was still becoming. She hadn’t yet learned the particular kind of love that breaks you open. She hadn’t discovered her own capacity for patience, or ferocity, or the way her heart could expand to hold more than she ever thought possible. She was wonderful. She was also incomplete.
I think we’ve been asking the wrong question.
The conversation around “mom identity” tends to frame it as a loss — something precious that was taken from us the moment we became responsible for other humans. And yes, there is loss. Real loss. Of time, of freedom, of the luxury of being your own first priority. I don’t want to gloss over that.
But what if motherhood didn’t just subtract from who we were — what if it also added?
Not in the greeting-card way. Not the “you’ll-never-know-love-until-you’re-a-mother” way that erases women who aren’t mothers and honestly can feel a little condescending even to those of us who are.
I mean something quieter. The version of me who exists now has depths that the woman in that photo hadn’t been required to find yet. She’s been to harder places. She’s had to rebuild herself from the inside out more than once. She’s learned — slowly, imperfectly, with a lot of false starts — how to want things again after years of not knowing it was allowed.
So do I want her back — the woman before?
Yes. Parts of her, absolutely. The one who made decisions quickly and didn’t second-guess herself into paralysis. The one who read books all the way through and had opinions about things beyond school lunch menus. The one who could be still without also composing a mental to-do list.
But I don’t want to go backward. I want to carry forward what she was, alongside everything that’s been added since.
I want to be the woman who is both — the one she was becoming, and the one motherhood has made.
The clarity I keep returning to is this: identity isn’t something you protect from change. It’s something you tend to through it.
You are still in there. Maybe quieter than you used to be. Maybe changed in ways you’re still making sense of. But the question isn’t whether you survived becoming a mother — it’s what you want to do now that you know you did.
That woman in the photo? She’d be proud of you. Even if she wouldn’t recognize everything about who you’ve become.
Especially because of that.
Who was I before I became mom? And do I even want her back?
There’s a photo of me from before. Before the minivan, before the school calendars, before I started buying things in bulk and knowing instinctively which child prefers the blue cup.…
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