There are things mothers are allowed to say.
I’m tired.
I need a break.
I haven’t slept properly in months.
And then there are the things we learn to keep to ourselves.
I miss who I was before I became a mother.
Not because we don’t love our children.
Not because we would undo them.
In fact, perhaps that is what makes this so difficult to explain.
Because there is nothing quite like the smell of your baby. Nothing like watching their face change when they recognise you, or waiting for that first smile and then discovering that somehow you would do almost anything to see it again.
There is something extraordinary about realising that you are your baby’s home. Before they understand anything about the world, they understand you. Your voice. Your smell. Your arms. The particular way you hold them.
For a while, you are their whole world.
And it can be wonderful.
Not the kind of wonderful we sometimes perform when somebody asks how motherhood is going. Actually wonderful. Tender and funny and visceral and overwhelming. A love so physical that sometimes you look at this little person and cannot quite understand how they exist.
And still, you can be lonely.
You can sit in a dark room at three in the morning with the person you love most in the world asleep against your chest and feel profoundly alone.
You can be needed more than you have ever been needed and, somehow, feel invisible.
You can adore being somebody’s mother and miss being simply yourself.
The joy does not cancel out the loneliness. And the loneliness does not make the joy any less real.
You can love your children and grieve what you lost
We don’t talk enough about grief in motherhood.
We talk about gratitude. We talk about love. We talk about how quickly it goes and how lucky we are.
All of those things can be true.
But becoming a mother also asks us to give things up. Sometimes temporarily. Sometimes permanently.
There is the obvious stuff: sleep, spontaneity, privacy. But there can also be careers that bend, friendships that change, money that becomes tighter, relationships that have to be rebuilt and a body that no longer feels entirely your own.
Sometimes what you miss is ridiculously ordinary.
The freedom to decide what to do with a Saturday morning.
To leave the house without checking whether somebody needs you.
To make a decision simply because you want to.
You can be grateful for the life you have and still miss parts of the life you had.
Something can give you more than you ever imagined and still cost you something.
Sometimes it isn’t your old life you miss. It’s yourself.
When women say they want to “feel like themselves again”, we often interpret that very literally.
Perhaps they need a night out. A haircut. Exercise. A weekend away.
And those things can be lovely.
But sometimes the longing goes much deeper.
You miss being a person whose thoughts could finish before somebody interrupted them.
You miss having desires that weren’t organised around somebody else.
You miss making decisions without calculating what everybody else needed first.
You miss being ambitious without wondering whether your ambition will inconvenience your family.
You might even miss being selfish.
Not cruel. Not uncaring.
Just occasionally allowed to put yourself first without needing to justify it.
And sometimes there is resentment
This is harder to admit.
Because good mothers aren’t supposed to resent motherhood.
But resentment does not necessarily mean you resent your children.
Sometimes you resent being the person who remembers everything. The appointments, the forms, the food, the clothes they have grown out of, the thing they suddenly announce they need for school tomorrow morning.
You resent being the default.
And sometimes the resentment is directed at the person you love.
You can lie awake with a baby at three in the morning, hear your partner breathing peacefully beside you and feel a flash of anger so disproportionate that it frightens you.
You can hear, “Just tell me what needs doing,” and think: Why am I also responsible for knowing what you need to do?
You can watch somebody else retain pieces of their old freedom while yours seems to require planning, negotiation and childcare.
And then comes another layer.
The guilt.
Because you love this family.
So you swallow the resentment and tell yourself you should be more grateful.
Until eventually you aren’t quite sure whether you are exhausted, angry, lonely or simply disappearing.
When your body stops feeling entirely like yours
Motherhood can also change the relationship you have with your own body.
Pregnancy changes it. Birth changes it. Feeding can change it.
Then there is the constant physical demand of small children — carrying, touching, climbing, pulling, cuddling, waking.
There are days when somebody has been touching you almost continuously.
And then perhaps the person you love reaches for you at the end of the day and, instead of wanting to be touched, something inside you thinks:
Please. Nobody else need anything from my body.
That can be difficult to admit too.
Because it isn’t necessarily about how much you love your partner. And it isn’t simply about whether you want sex.
Sometimes you miss feeling sexual.
Sometimes you miss being looked at as a woman rather than as somebody’s mother.
Sometimes you miss looking at yourself that way.
A body that once belonged mostly to you can become the body that carries, feeds, comforts, gets up in the night and keeps going.
The woman inside it is still there.
But sometimes she can become difficult to hear.
And then they start becoming themselves
There is another change nobody really prepares you for.
Your children grow.
The baby whose smell you couldn’t stop breathing in becomes a child, and then gradually someone with opinions you didn’t give them, humour you didn’t teach them, strengths you cannot take credit for and struggles you cannot simply fix.
And somewhere along the way, you begin to see them not only as your children, but as people.
That can be breathtaking.
You find yourself in awe of who they are becoming.
And it can break your heart a little too.
Because you begin to see the places where life may be difficult for them. Their sensitivities. Their fears. The things they find harder than other people seem to. You want desperately to protect those tender places, while slowly understanding that you cannot protect them from everything.
At the same time, they reveal things about you.
I don’t think we completely know how we will parent until our children arrive. They have an extraordinary ability to find the parts of us that are unfinished.
Our impatience. Our fear. Our need for control. The things we promised ourselves we would never repeat. The things we discover we have repeated anyway.
But they reveal other things too.
Our capacity to change. To apologise. To try again. To love someone without being able to control who they become.
And there is something beautiful about this stage of motherhood.
You are no longer their entire world.
In some ways, that hurts.
In others, it gives you the privilege of standing slightly further back and watching a person emerge.
And perhaps, as they become more themselves, there is an invitation for you to do the same.
Perhaps you don’t need the old you back
When a woman tells me she wants to feel like herself again, I’m not sure the answer is always to go searching for the woman she was before.
Perhaps you aren’t supposed to get all of her back.
Some parts of her still belong to you.
Some you have outgrown.
And there may be parts of the woman you are becoming that you haven’t met yet.
Motherhood changes us.
So does life.
Love, grief, divorce, ageing, illness, disappointment, success — we are not supposed to move through any of it completely untouched.
So perhaps the question isn’t:
How do I get the old me back?
Perhaps it is:
Who am I now?
What do I like now?
What matters to me now?
What have I outgrown?
What am I tolerating simply because I have tolerated it for years?
What do I want the next part of my life to feel like?
Those questions can be frightening.
But they can also be the beginning of something.
Making room for the woman alongside the mother
Your children can be among the great loves of your life without becoming the entirety of your identity.
Wanting work that matters to you does not diminish them.
Neither does wanting time alone, friendship, money, sex, adventure, creativity, ambition or simply a room where nobody calls your name for half an hour.
Your children do not need you to disappear in order to prove that you love them.
Perhaps the work is not to become the woman you were before children.
It is to make room for the woman who exists now alongside the mother you have become.
Maybe you don’t know her particularly well yet.
Maybe you haven’t asked what she wants for years.
That doesn’t mean she has disappeared.
You can start by becoming curious about her.
Because missing yourself is not the same thing as wishing your children away.
For so long, you have been somebody else’s home.
Perhaps it is time to become a little more at home in yourself again.
About Solange
Solange Martins Stanger is the founder of SOL Coaching, a women’s coach, maternity nurse and mother of two, with over 15 years of experience supporting families. She understands how deeply motherhood can change a woman’s sense of herself. Her work offers space for women to feel heard, reconnect with their own needs and explore what they want for their lives—alongside caring for the people they love.