You Will Lose Yourself In Motherhood: Excerpt from Mothershift: Reclaiming Motherhood as a Rite of Passage by Jessie Harrold
“It’s not like I’m going to let motherhood change who I am,” I remember saying, with unintended smugness, hand hovering over my resplendent belly when I was pregnant with my first child. I felt beautiful and powerful, and morning sickness was only a temporary limitation to my life as an avid triathlete and surfer.
Somehow, I was certain that I had the key, some mysterious alchemy of ambition and a supportive partner and a really great baby carrier: I would not lose myself in motherhood.
Many of us try mightily not to lose ourselves in motherhood. Of course, lots of us have less-than-ideal maternity leave and childcare circumstances which jolt us back into our pre-baby realities whether we like it or not. But we also hear stories of celebrity mamas hitting the gym to achieve their pre-motherhood shape. We talk about striving for a “new normal,” which, for so many of us, looks a lot like the old normal. We secretly, or not so secretly, applaud women who are meandering through the farmers market with a baby who appears still wet behind the ears. Women who admit to losing themselves in motherhood have become the target of pitiful glances, life-hacking life coaches, and motivational Pinterest memes.
To me, all of this seems as though our culture is saying that motherhood, being one of the least valued roles a woman can occupy in our society, is to be denied at all costs. It should certainly not define a woman.
Should it?
In my work as a doula for the last fifteen years, I have seen the behind-the-scenes truth of thousands of new mothers’ lives, and I want to say it’s often the women who seem to have picked up right where they left off before birthing their babies who are secretly struggling the most. So often, they are pushing through exhaustion or fighting the demands of breastfeeding, desperately clinging to the behaviors of their pre-motherhood lives.
And I get it. Because this was me, too.
But the truth is, motherhood will change you.
You will lose yourself in motherhood.
Before you start breathing into a paper bag, let me also say this: It’s supposed to.
Creating an entirely new human with your body, birthing it, perhaps nourishing it with your breasts every two to three hours all day long, and then having this little creature need you in the most primal way known to mammals for the next eighteen-or-so-ish years changes you.
You will lose yourself in motherhood. And though that might seem terrifying to you now, let me say the next part, the part we all keep forgetting: you will find someone entirely new. I feel like I want to say that again.
You will lose yourself in motherhood.
And:
You will find someone entirely new.
You may find a woman whose body made an everyday miracle.
You will find the paradox of knowing this while also knowing that your body has been made less societally acceptable in the process, and you might find a way to respect the skin you’re in more deeply than you ever did before.
You will find an empathy for your baby, and possibly for the world, that takes your breath away. You will find a gut instinct, a knowingness, when it comes to your child and maybe to other things, too, that guides you like a compass that lives somewhere within your newly expanded heart.
You will find a cadre of other women who get it, whose messy buns and Lego-strewn floors look a lot like yours, and you will find smiles and knowing glances to assuage every grocery store meltdown.
You will find a new understanding for your own mother and the mothers before her.
You might find a way to slow down. As you care for your child, you will find your needs pared down to the basics: sleep, water, food, repeat. Everything else falls away, because it often has to, and sometimes what you might find underneath it all is freedom.
You might find yourself with an entirely new set of priorities in your life, with laser discernment for any career path, person, or way of spending time that doesn’t feel worthy of your now more-divided energy and attention.
You might.
But first, you have to lose yourself in motherhood.
That is, you have to surrender to what motherhood is here to show you.
As for me? I don’t care very much about competing in triathlons anymore, and I am just now, twelve years into motherhood, contemplating the idea of surfing again. I shower almost every day, and I drink hot cups of coffee—not reheated or choked down cold while saying the Motherhood Mantra of “No really, it’s an iced coffee! So good!”
All of this took much, much longer than what felt comfortable to me, trust me. But also? I left the job I hated and started a business. I started writing poetry again. I have found a sense of deep permission in surrendering the parts of myself that motherhood has made irrelevant or impossible or, at the very least, not-right-now. I have begun to trust that the parts of me that I was meant to reclaim, eventually, after becoming a mother would return to my life with a force that I have found to be almost gravitational—even if it doesn’t happen on my time line. It never does. And I have found a reverence for the woman I’ve become since I’ve brought two little humans earthside. It’s a reverence for myself, for all mothers now, and for the mothers before me.
And so, mama, if you’re feeling lost in motherhood, let me remind you: It’s okay. You are okay. This is normal; you are supposed to feel like a different person. Finding your way into who you are as a mother will take time and may be uncomfortable. Discovering the woman you’re becoming is like following the trail of a wild animal in the woods: walk soft, listen close, and be patient. She is waiting for you.
BUT FIRST, CRY
“You can’t do the growth without the grief.”
This has become one of my favorite things to say to the mothers that I work with. Grief, sadness, and a sense of loss are messy, snotty things to deal with, and most of us would rather bypass the process altogether. But I have a theory that ignoring or bypassing grief that is showing up in your life is like eating carrots when you’re really craving a chocolate bar. The need to grieve—or eat chocolate—goes unmet, and so it returns, often with a fierce vengeance.
There is evidence to back my theory. A 2003 study by researchers Denise Lawler and Marlene Sinclair interviewed new mothers about their postpartum depression, finding that “it was after they had experienced a cycle of grief that they were able to accept their new self and new role as a mother. These women came to accept their experiences as normal. They felt they had to experience the death of their former self before giving birth to their new persona.”2
The challenge is that we have lost the skills and spiritual literacy that our ancestors had for being with and integrating grief. In our culture, grief is something that happens behind closed doors and should be resolved as quickly as possible—we have few meaningful rituals to help us hold the bigness of our grief. Grief, like motherhood itself, is also deeply countercultural, requiring us to slow down and tussle with complex emotions that don’t always have “right answers” or even any resolution at all.
In my years of exploring grief in the context of life transition, I’ve come to know that grief usually wants four things: to be felt, to be honored, to be metabolized, and, sometimes, to be released. Grief wants to be felt fully through your tears, through your body; it wants to be honored with deep self-compassion and validation. It wants to be metabolized and moved through you, with journaling, sharing, and meaning-making with a trusted friend, coach, or therapist. And finally, it sometimes wants to be released—for the past to be given permission to live in the past, or at least to take up its “right size” in your life.3
It’s important to note that feeling and expressing grief may be additionally challenging for BIPOC or otherwise marginalized mothers. When I was employed at a nonprofit providing prenatal education, doula support, and breastfeeding support, I worked with many mothers whose marginalized identity put them at greater risk for being flagged by child and family services. One mother in particular shared with me her concern that after having a C-section, she couldn’t take her garbage to the garbage chute. She worried that her caseworker would certainly consider having full garbage bags in her apartment a strike against her. Under these circumstances, how could this mother—and so many others like her—feel safe to express feelings of grief or ambivalence about her motherhood? For Black mothers, the “strong Black woman” archetype may limit the ability to tap into feelings of grief about motherhood. Helena Andrews-Dyer, author of The Mamas, writes: “I’ve learned through my own experiences—and those deep ones swimming in my blood—that you should never under any circumstances be vulnerable. Why not admit to the whole damn world that I had no clue what I was doing with this baby in my belly and just hand my phone over with Child and Family services already dialed?”4
Beyond the permission, skills, and privilege required to experience and express grief in motherhood, so many of the mothers I work with deeply fear the idea that they might lose themselves entirely in a pit of despair. They worry that allowing themselves to feel grief at all might cause them to slip into postpartum depression. Indeed, for this reason and others, we have a great fear of grief in our culture. We tend to metaphorically—and sometimes literally—ask ourselves Are you done crying yet? rather than Have you cried enough yet? One of my teachers, death doula Sarah Kerr, PhD, talks about the importance of “touching the bottom” of your grief—of actually allowing yourself to go there. She says, “Coming up the other side of your grief, there’s a kind of ferocity to what’s true, to being true to who you are.”5 This is important to remember, and also, as Martin Prechtel, author of The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise, teaches, believing that grief might swallow you whole is a good sign that you need “someone to pull you out of the water” if and when it’s required—the anchoring accompaniment of a friend, family member, or wise guide on your grief journey.6
As it relates to grief in matrescence, we are so attuned to the existence of postpartum depression that, in a double-edged sword kind of way, we’re quick to diagnose and treat women who may just be feeling the full spectrum of emotions that are perfectly normal in motherhood. Scholar Paula Nicholson, PhD, posits that “some degree of postpartum depression should be considered the rule rather than the exception. [It is also] potentially a healthy, grieving reaction to loss.”7 But when we as a society don’t have language for and the skills to work with the very normal las muertes chiquitas of motherhood, our well-meaning efforts to support new mothers may actually be pathologizing and bypassing this crucial phase of the transition into motherhood.
All of this is to say that if you find yourself feeling sadness at this stage in your transition to motherhood, it’s okay.
I want to invite you to take time here to feel how you’re feeling. Cry if you need to.
Cry enough.
Ask for help if you need it: you don’t need to do this alone.
AND SOMETIMES, SCREAM
It starts in my fingertips
an energy that shoots into my forearms, retracting muscles and
drawing my fingers into fists
it flies up to my shoulders
and they jerk toward my earlobes as if magnetized.
The effort leaves me trembling.
The sinew in my neck bulges
as too-big energy passes through
strategically placed filters
First, it squeezes through Not Right Now
and more easily bypasses Not Here.
It jumps the hurdles of Bad Motherhood and What Will People Think
and before I know it
my Primal Scream
rattles my teeth and my ears.
The faces of the people around me,
the pillow I’ve used to dampen the sound
reveal their shock at my outpouring.
While we have an increasingly prevalent discourse about postpartum depression in our culture, we most definitely lack a fulsome acknowledgment of mothers’ rage. We have reason enough to feel angry given the impossible social conditions and expectations under which many of us mother, the devaluing of motherhood, the sheer magnitude of the transformation becoming a mother represents for our lives, the daily frustrations of caring for little humans, and the fact that most of us are doing the lion’s share of that work—and are expected to feel satisfied doing it.
Maternal anger may be the fiercest taboo of them all—and yet so many mothers do experience anger, citing that, in fact, they had never been an angry person before motherhood. But, as Dr. Barbara Almond, psychiatrist and author of The Monster Within: The Hidden Side of Motherhood, wrote about mothers’ rage: “This aggression is both psychologically inevitable and socially unacceptable.”8
Read that again.
Psychologically inevitable.
And so, if part of the emotional landscape of your motherhood includes anger, know that you are far from alone—it’s yet another one of those things that no one talks about when it comes to their mothering experience.
Maternal anger expert Christine Ou, PhD, shares that although anger can be a subtheme of postpartum depression, it may also occur independent of depressive symptoms. The biggest predictors of mothers’ anger are violations of autonomy and unmet expectations.9
My sense is that these sources of anger have a lot to do with our society’s failure to support mothers, to be sure, but just as much to do with our failure to speak honestly and openly about the realities of motherhood. I cannot help but see mothers’ anger at their loss of autonomy as a function of our inability to grieve that loss and our society’s constant reassertion that we shouldn’t have lost ourselves in the first place. I cannot help but see mothers’ anger at the violation of their expectations as a function of the fact that we are consistently inundated with portrayals of idyllic pregnancy, birth, and motherhood online. So many of us are unconsciously steeping in the perfect mother myth that of course the often (usually!) gritty reality of motherhood catches us off guard. No one told me. No one told me. No one told me: the anthem of modern motherhood.
More and more often, I find myself working with mothers who feel frightened of their own anger and unsure of how to metabolize it. They are desperately seeking quiet corners to cry or to scream, lest anyone—especially their children—witness the full spectrum of their emotions. However, as Almond asserts, “Denying ambivalence and the hate that engenders it denies a mother her personhood.”10
Yes, hate.
Knowing that anger is a normal feeling in motherhood, I hope you feel bolstered in your ability to express it somehow. But know that “anger privilege” is certainly at play here: there is a hierarchy of People Who Are Allowed to Be Angry in our culture, starting at the top with white men whose anger is often perceived as power and moving on down the lines of gender, race, class, and marginalization from there.
Brave spaces to share your rage might include with a loved one, skilled coach, or therapist. You might run or swim it out; you might, indeed, scream into a pillow. And if your rage—or any of the big feelings you might be having about motherhood—surfaces at a time when you are with your little ones, know that the most important thing is that they know they are safe and loved and that the emotion you’re feeling is not directed toward them. In this way, you can model for them what it looks like to be a whole human and take responsibility for your emotions in a courageous and healthy way.
And there’s also this: anger and rage are almost always a reaction to injustice, to the ways our needs as humans are being overlooked or dismissed.11
In my life I’ve learned that anger can do one of two things: it can eat you alive from the inside or it can become what I’ve come to call a “holy anger”—an assertion of one’s humanity that has teeth and muscle and energy to move toward a better way. The former results in what motherhood sociologist Sophie Brock, PhD, calls the “anger-guilt trap,” wherein mothers express anger, feel guilty for expressing anger, and so try to suppress it, resulting, of course, in even more anger.12 A
holy anger, however, calls out injustice and works for change. A holy anger, as Rich wrote, threatens the institution of Motherhood.13 In the oppression of motherhood, I located a holy anger that catalyzed me in a way that I may never have otherwise been catalyzed. And so, the paradox is that only by feeling in my bones how tightly I was held under the thumb of patriarchal motherhood did I find the ferocity to want things to be different.
Jessie Harrold is a coach and doula who has been supporting women to navigate rites of passage and other radical life transformations for over fifteen years. She is the founder of the internationally acclaimed matrescence support program MotherSHIFT as well as The Village, its sister program for postpartum support professionals. She has a master’s in health promotion and a B.Sc. in neuroscience, and her research on women’s experiences navigating health and wellbeing has won multiple awards and been published in peer-reviewed journals internationally. Jessie’s work has also been featured in International Doula Magazine, Spirituality & Health, Today’s Parent, Green Parent, Motherly, Expectful, and more. She is the author of Project Body Love and the host of the Becoming Podcast. To learn more, please visit www.jessieharrold.com.
NOTES
2. Denise Lawler and Marlene Sinclair, “Grieving for My Former Self: A Phenomenological Hermeneutical Study of Women’s Lived Experience of Postnatal Depression,” Evidence Based Midwifery 1, no.2 (2003): 36.
3. Sarah Kerr, Ritual Skills for Living and Dying (Online course, 2021).
4. Andrews-Dyer, The Mamas, 47.
5. Sarah Kerr, Ritual Skills for Living and Dying.
6. Martin Prechtel, The Smell of Rain on Dust (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2015).
7. Paula Nicholson, “Loss, Happiness, and Postpartum Depression: The Ultimate Paradox,” Canadian Psychology 40 (May 1999): 162–78.
8. Barbara Almond, The Monster Within: The Hidden Side of Motherhood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 11.
9. Christine H.K. Ou, Wendy A. Hall, and Robyn Stremler, “Seeing Red: A Grounded Theory Study of Women’s Anger after Childbirth,” Qualitative Health Research 32, no. 12 (2018): 336–46.
10. Almond, The Monster Within, 11.
11. Ou, Hall, and Stremler, “Seeing Red.”
12. Sophie Brock, “The Anger-Guilt Trap and How to Start Breaking the Cycle,” accessed August 1, 2023, https://motherhoodstudies.newzenler.com/courses/angerguilttrap.
13. Rich, Of Woman Born, 30.