She Knew Her Mom Loved Her. She Never Knew Her Mom.

A therapist commented on one of my posts this week and I haven’t stopped thinking about it.

She said the best parts of her mom were that she always knew she was so unbelievably precious to her. She knew this woman wanted her and delighted in her. For sure, that was never something she had to work through in therapy. But what is part of her work is not really knowing her mother. She and her siblings were her mom’s whole life. She has no idea what her mother’s favourite food was. No idea what she did for fun… no idea who her friends were or if she had any hobbies.

I could stop right there.

We’ve got the “losing yourself in motherhood” thing all wrong.

Nobody actually thinks they’re going to disappear when they have kids. What we’re actually scared of is becoming the person who just runs the house. The one who does the drop off, makes the dinner, remembers who has a dentist appointment. Doing everything, every single day, and nobody actually knowing you while you do it.

So as always my advice is subtraction. Get away from them. Protect your identity by protecting your distance from your own family. Go get the pedicure, take the girls’ trip. Do those things, they’re good. But that advice quietly tells you that you only exist in the hours you’re away from your kids. That who you are has to happen somewhere else, because inside your own house, you’re just Mom.

But, I don’t buy that.

If they know you, you can’t lose you.

Here’s the actual answer to “how do I not lose myself in motherhood?”: let them know you. All of you… the old you, the you right now, and whatever you’re becoming next.

Think about it. If your kids know the version of you before them, and they know the version of you now with a baby or a toddler or whatever chaos you’re in, and they keep getting invited in as you change over the next two, ten, twenty years, when exactly do you disappear? You don’t. There’s no version of you that gets lost, because none of it ever stopped being visible to them. They just keep knowing more of you.

That is some of the most important advice any mom can hear. Losing yourself isn’t about becoming a different person when you become a mom (of course you will be different). It’s about becoming a person your kids never actually meet.

This is also how you enjoy motherhood. This is the good part. This is how you actually enjoy being a mom, not just get through it.

Getting to know you means actually getting to know you. How you like to dress, what makeup you wear, your favourite song on the radio, the one you scream to when it comes on. Your coffee order, the thing you used to collect as a kid, the fact that you loved painting, or you were obsessed with a certain band, or you used to write, or whatever it was. Getting to know who you are with kids, and who you were before them, and who you’re turning into now.

Your kids are not the sacrifice. They are the life. And you’re still allowed to add other things into that life. Your favourite things, your interests, your opinions, all of it gets to exist right alongside them, in the same life, at the same time.

We are so obsessed with getting their life perfect. So obsessed with meeting all of their needs, that we forget to meet any of our own. We spend all day making sure they’re regulated and seen and known, and somewhere in there we quietly stop letting them see us.

Invite them into your life, so you don’t build your whole life around theirs.

What got me about that comment is she’s not a kid still figuring her mom out. She’s a grown, working therapist, someone who does this for a living, and she still can’t tell you her own mother’s favourite food. That’s not a small thing to not know about the person who raised you.

I think about my own mom a lot because of this. She napped every day. She was always on the phone and drank her tea hot with a little sugar. I remember those things because they were hers. They were specific to her. And I wonder what else I would have asked her, if I’d known to ask.

So let them know you.

Let them know what you’re into. Let them know what lights you up. Let them know the things that excite you now, and the things that used to. It doesn’t matter if you’re changing. It doesn’t matter if you’re growing or evolving or becoming someone slightly different than you were last year. Let them know you anyway. Let them inside your world. Let them be part of it.

It’s so simple yet it’s the first thing we forget to do.

—Danielle, xo