The Postpartum Identity Crisis: Feeling Like Yourself After Having a Baby
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Did you feel like you went through a postpartum identity crisis as a new mom? How long did it take you to “feel like yourself” after giving birth and becoming a mom? Do you think you ever did, or rather just found a new groove as a mom? Which activities helped you feel like your old self again, and which ones made the difference most obvious?
This is a big topic, but I think it’s a really important one. It’s also one of the things that was most — surprising, I guess? — about the whole experience of becoming a mom. Looking back I think, of COURSE everything is going to change once you have kids — and of course no one can explain it to you or prepare you for it beforehand.
{related: how do you define yourself after having kids?}
The first time I had an inkling that it might take a while to feel like myself again was at my postpartum checkup with my first son. When I mentioned that I wasn’t feeling like myself, the midwife casually said, “It’ll be two years before you feel like a woman again.” I thought it was the meanest thing anyone could say to me in that moment.
When I mentioned that I wasn’t feeling like myself, the midwife casually said, “It’ll be two years before you feel like a woman again.” I thought it was the meanest thing anyone could say to me in that moment.
I also wasn’t really clear on how she meant it. Physically? Emotionally? It was a bit of a mystery. But around the time my son turned 18 months, I finally started getting my groove back. It was like seeing a glimmer at the end of a long tunnel — and I realized it was this memory of who I’d been before becoming a mom.
It wasn’t just the lack of sleep, the lack of me time… it wasn’t just my new mom body… it wasn’t just missing my 20s and early 30s, or the freedom that came with being a DINK.
{related: If you’re still in the sticky-fingered-toddler stage of parenting, you need to check out our list of the best brands for washable workwear – we also feature trendy washable workwear every Wednesday, and have done roundups of just washable basics for work outfits}
For me, the easiest way to think about it — the way I’ve finally settled on thinking about it — was that becoming a mom meant the almost total death of my carefree self. I won’t be totally carefree, ever again. It sounds heavy, but I don’t think any parent ever will. There are so many positive trade-offs, of course — the joy my boys bring me on a daily basis, the way my heart sings when I look over and they’re both having a snuggle with daddy, the sense of contentment — of completeness — I feel with my family, the pride I feel for their growing up so well. But not carefree — I am never carefree.
In the three and a half years since becoming a mom, I’ve broached the topic with a few friends, privately and even at parties, and it’s amazing how everyone seems to feel like this — dads, moms, everyone. We all struggle with this new reality.
I think it might be more difficult for Type A women, as I tend to associate us with having a stronger sense of self. I’ve mentioned this before, but I saw one successful woman recently note on Facebook that she stopped nursing her children at the 15-week mark to regain a sense of herself — but I don’t think it would have been that easy for me, even if I had stopped nursing then.
{related: Type A women discuss: breastfeeding vs formula}
Part of this is a problem of time, or lack thereof — between family and work there hasn’t been a ton of time for doing some of the things I’ve done in the past to get my groove back, such as taking a writing class just for the joy of writing.
I don’t know, guys — the postpartum identity crisis is a big topic, and one I’ve been hesitant to write about for fear of choosing the wrong words. What has your experience been with this? Did you feel like you lost “yourself” for a while after you became a mother? What helped you find yourself again?
Psst: some great books for working mothers:
Some of the best books for working mothers include:
Photo credit: Shutterstock/irin-k.
My little one was born 13 months ago and I still don’t feel like myself. I’ve started therapy and I’m seeing my OBGYN next week for a checkup, and I’m planning to ask about PPD and possible medication.
I think you hit the nail on the head when you talk about time. There is just not enough time to do the kind of self-care I used to do whenever I felt “off.”
I hope some BTDT moms pop in with some good advice…
I just hit 18 months and feel like I’m turning a corner. It feels really good.
The hard part is now that my husband and I now feel the need to move beyond crisis mode to some sort of maintainable routine–but I’m a Big Law litigator. Things just aren’t that easy. We know that we can’t live in crisis mode forever and there’s suddenly a lot of pressure to figure something out to make everything work.
Ohhhh, excellent topic. This is long and rambling.
My oldest is three and my youngest is 18 months and I’m just now starting to feel like I’m getting my groove back. In the past few months, I’ve started having dinners/drinks out with friends more, having the kids spend the night with the grandparents for “date night,” and just generally feeling more like myself and less guilty about wanting to spend time how I want to.
I don’t know if having kids right on top of each other exacerbated it (more than likely), but I feel like we’re finally emerging from “constant crisis mode” to “manageable chaos.” Before now, all my “self-care” time was sacrificed because I was either too busy or, even if I legitimately had time, the working-mom-guilt hit me and I couldn’t make myself spend time away from my kids when we were together. I still feel that way sometimes (ask me how long it’s been since I had a pedicure), but I’m getting better.
More than anything, forcing myself to get up and workout every morning before work has given me my sense-of-self back. It’s horrible and early and every morning I want to go back to sleep, but I feel off-kilter the rest of the day if I don’t do it. I didn’t exercise consistently (or at all…) basically since I was pregnant with my first. So my morning routine is not only helping be healthier (which makes me happy), and lose weight (more happy), but also giving me time to only focus on myself. An extra hour of sleep is worth sacrificing, for me.
My LO is six months old, so I’m still pretty early in this journey. I feel like I slipped into motherhood almost seamlessly. I don’t really mind that my social life has dwindled or that my time to exercise or read a book is less – the self-care component has not been a big issue for me. What I do mind is how distracted I feel from all my other responsibilities: work, marriage, volunteering and so on. I feel like I “mom” really well, but anything else is getting far less of my attention and energy and so I don’t do them as well. Others do not seem to notice a lack of quality when I have asked for honest feedback, but I feel that I’m not giving my full efforts.
I’m not sure when I turned the corner exactly. Sometime after 12 months and sometime before he turned 2. I feel pretty good! Almost sexy, sometimes. I am not disgusted when I look in the mirror anymore, though I could still stand to lose weight and tone up. Let’s put it this way – we don’t have a scale at our house! We are still breastfeeding – not my plan, but here we are! – and I wonder if things will level out even more once I no longer have those hormones in play.
I can’t remember where Kat said it, but she once used the term “pregnancy corridor” to describe this stage in our lives… and I wonder if, once you’re completely out of the pregnancy corridor, things change for the better?
I think there are multiple answers to this question, even just for me.
With my first, I felt like I didn’t really “recover” from the pregnancy and birth until nine months after she was born. This was also about 2 months after I stopped breastfeeding, which may have had something to do with it.
But in terms of feeling like myself, it didn’t really happen until my daughter was at least 2. And shortly thereafter I got pregnant again and the cycle just repeated.
Now, my kids are almost 4 and 1.5. I don’t know if I feel like myself, if I feel like a new person, if I feel recovered. There’s so much work involved in having two kids, a big job, a home, a family. It’s all wonderful, but it’s a ton of work. There’s just not very much space in there for me. I agree with Kat that a lot of it has to do with the death of the unencumbered self. When my daughter was born, I, in my crazy post-partum head, told myself that I would walk over hot coals, throw myself off a bridge, sacrifice myself however it took to keep her safe. And it made me feel better to reassure myself that I would do those things for her – that I would protect her at any cost. (Those bonding hormones are no joke.) I don’t feel crazed like that anymore – but I also think that when you love someone that much, it is impossible to ever feel free of vulnerability, free of worry.
I was about 11 months post-partum, getting back into old clothes and into the swing of things, and whoops, preggers again…
For me, it was also about accepting the “new normal” and sort of mourning the loss of my old life. I had a pre-natal yoga teacher reiterate the importance of kindness. Kindness to ourselves (self-care), and kindness to our partners (and vice versa).
During the new-mom/parent stage, I think we have to scale back on our expectations, which was hard for me to do. No, I couldn’t volunteer as much, my house isn’t as clean, my body is all kinds of wobbly and different, etc. The biggest helps for me where: 1) buying clothes that I feel good in right now, 2) making a 3-item to do list each day (#1 was “keeping baby alive and healthy) and promising to cross off 2, and 3) getting outside. Something about fresh air helps.
And I think we need to reframe the goal from “feeling like a woman again” to “embracing this phase of womanhood now”. Our bodies just did/are doing awesome and heroic things! Post-baby bodies (and minds) are still womanly, just a very different aspect of being a woman that you cannot fully appreciate until your there.
I would write a lot abt this if my baby would let me put her down today. Short version: I felt a lot more like myself about a year after the first one, second hasn’t set me back that much. The jump from one to two kids was not nearly as paradigm-shifting as dink to one kid.
Agree that carefree days are gone… But I am hopeful they’ll come back when kids are older (like, adults maybe? But sooner would be great.)
This is a big topic. In the beginning, I was too overwhelmed to even worry about being myself again. At around 16 weeks postpartum, I went back to work, and – as hard as it was – it helped restore some of my sense of self / seeing myself as an individual/worker and not just a mom. I also started working out at 16 weeks PP (2 to 3x a week, so not a huge time commitment). I had never been a must-exercise type of person, but losing weight and gaining energy helped with my overall confidence and feeling more like myself.
At 12.5 months postpartum, I still don’t totally feel like myself – but I think I’m close. Like POSITA, I feel like most days are just keeping my head above water at work and at home, and going from crisis to crisis.
Honestly, though, I don’t know that there’s a way to go back and capture a “self” from the past. And do I want to? I’m not sure. There is so much I love about where I am and who I am exactly at this moment in time.
Good childcare is huge. Our first place was just ok and I was having trouble focusing at work. I needed to find a daycare that I loved. So I went back on the hunt and found a great place. Paying more was rough, but it was worth it to me to have the peace of mind. Once that was taken care of, everything else started falling into place. As my daughter got older, she was excited to see her teachers and told me all about the awesome stuff they did during the day. She is now 3 and I think she likes school more than being at boring old home.
The daycare was right by our house. So if I had a really hard day of work, I could go home and decompress for a few minutes before picking my daughter up. As she got older, I would use the time to make her dinner. At first, I felt a little guilty, but soon I realized that it was better to be in a good mood when I picked her up, then in a thinking about all the things I still needed to do at work mood. It was a good way to move from work to mom and have some alone time. It is really important to have that time for yourself. Finding a time in your day just to be yours is a really big deal. Even if it is just a few minutes.
Lastly, I would say my biggest leap to feeling normal and not overtaxed was that I turned off my cell phone when I came home. Nothing is an emergency at night. Before babies I could check emails, take phone calls, cook dinner, etc. But after babies, I realized that the phone was too much. Funny enough, no one really noticed that I stopped answering emails at 8pm. I do get into work a little early so that I can send responses back first thing, but it is not that much of a hardship. I have even been promoted since, so I can definitely say that not being attached to my phone has worked out. The extra bajillion distractions your phone adds just stressed me out, so I dropped it. So did my husband, and he has helped out a lot more since then. Not to mention, I think we actually talk more which is nice.
Ooooo, this is such an interesting topic. In many ways I still feel like myself, and never felt like I was not “myself” in terms of personality, even from day one. That said, I was expecting having a baby to be REALLY really hard and kind of awful. I was expecting for it to ruin my body, whatever that means, and I was also expecting to get PPD. And yes, while having a newborn was hard, having a baby has been way more fun than I thought it would be, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much I’ve enjoyed it. And even though my body looks slightly different I have also surprised myself by not giving a crap. My husband and I have also made it a point almost from the very beginning to take time to have fun/do stuff for ourselves occasionally both together and individually. But I actually like hanging out with my daughter too.
The thing that I am struggling with is the feeling that I’ve sort of let myself go. I look decently good at work, but I caught sight of myself in a mirror at Target last weekend and was mildly horrified. I think part of that is the long winter and the fact that I kondo-ed my wardrobe and have basically no clothes and a lot of gaps in my wardrobe that need to be filled. I have not worked out once since my daughter was born either. I think I’ll work on that this summer. I’m actually really excited about trying to start living and eating more healthily now that it’s not just me anymore.
I do agree with the increase in worry and vulnerability, but “luckily” (?) I’ve always been anxious, so my new ramped up level of worry is not something that makes me feel less like myself.
I don’t feel like my pre-baby self at all, and like another poster said, I don’t want to. I have this whole new dimension – I’m a mom! And I love my daughter so much. I can’t imagine my life without her and I don’t want to. I do want to figure out a way to be more active, ideally *with* my daughter so I don’t have to sacrifice weekend time with her, but I figure that will come. For now, I’m trying to enjoy the slow speed of a baby, and I’m seeing the pace pick up as she grows into a toddler (she’s 13 months). I really love being a mom and I’m so happy that I get to be my daughter’s mom.
/I’ll probably get flack for saying any of that, but oh well. It’s on topic.
ETA: I had severe PPD and I’m still on meds + in therapy which has obviously made a huge difference.
Wearing real-people clothes and doing my hair and make-up every day were huge for me. At first I thought “oh, now I’m a mom I’ll just let my hair air-dry and it’ll be okay.” But it was never me in the mirror. Drying my hair takes 8 min (I’ve timed it) start to finish and it’s totally worth it. Getting the rest of our lives in place has been more of a process, but we’ve really approached it one thing at a time. At first it was just getting me into the shower at least 3x/week (on maternity leave). Then it was returning to work. Then getting the babies on a schedule. Now at 12 mo., we’re finally cleaning out things that have piled up, doing household maintenance, cooking dinner and packing lunches every night. AND we use Saturday naptime for mommy/daddy “nap” time. We try to fit it in other times during the week, too, but having an hour or so every Saturday for just us is great.
As for the never being carefree, I feel that. Exactly that. Even an evening out with friends isn’t the same. The quote “Making the decision to have a child – it is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.” sums it up perfectly for me. I say I “love” my children, but love doesn’t get close. It’s like they’re part of me, the most important, most vulnerable part. I don’t think them growing up makes you any more carefree because then who knows where they are or what they’re doing or if they’re safe. Every night I look at my boys sleeping in the nursery, I feel grateful they’re there where I can touch them and think about how hard it will be when they’re sleeping somewhere else and I can’t peek at them before bed. And they’ll have problems I can’t fix and face dangers I can’t fend off.
Timely! Just this weekend, I commented to my husband: I feel like myself. My daughter just turned three.
Over the weekend, I drove alone to a conference on topics I really care about, an hour outside the city, amidst rolling hills and dairy farms. Being outside, talking deeply with others on these topics, and knowing my daughter was having a great day with daddy allowed me to be more relaxed and unconcerned – and freer to just be myself – than I’ve been in a very long time. Just driving away – by myself – felt very freeing.
For both my husband and me, one of the biggest losses has been outdoor, alone or together. Of course, we can go on hikes or strolls with our daughter, but we used to spend full LONG days outside, pushing ourselves hard and coming home by headlamp. I don’t know if we’ll ever get that back. As a parent, I’m not comfortable doing some of the things I used to do.
My oldest is 3 and my younger son is 10 weeks. Oddly, I feel more like myself now than I have since I got pregnant with #1. I’m not sure why. And I feel more motivated to focus on my career than I have in a long time. Like a lot of posters I dislike how my postpartum body has turned out and wish I could exercise, but I’m kind of ok with it.