I knew having a baby would change my life.
I don’t think I understood that it would change me.
Before becoming a mother, I thought mostly about the practical changes. The sleepless nights. The responsibility. The fact that another human being would depend on me completely.
What I hadn’t understood was that motherhood would quietly rearrange so much of what I thought I knew about myself.
What mattered to me.
What I could tolerate.
What I wanted from my relationships.
What I wanted from work.
What I was willing to accept.
Even what I thought a good life looked like.
Some of those changes happened almost immediately.
Others took years for me to recognise.
And perhaps one of the strangest things is that we don’t seem to talk very much about this part.
We talk endlessly about babies developing.
Their first smile. Their first tooth. Their first word. Their first steps.
We expect them to change.
What we talk about far less is the development of the woman who becomes their mother.
There is a word for this
Years after I became a mother, I discovered a word that would have helped me understand some of what was happening.
Matrescence.
The term was introduced by medical anthropologist Dana Raphael in the 1970s to describe the transition into motherhood. More recently, psychologist Dr Aurélie Athan has developed the concept further, exploring becoming a mother as a developmental transformation — one that can affect us physically, psychologically, socially, relationally and in our sense of who we are.
In other words, becoming a mother isn’t simply about learning how to look after a baby.
A mother is developing too.
When I first understood that, something about it made immediate sense to me.
Because motherhood hadn’t simply added children to my life.
It had changed the way I experienced my life.
What happens to the woman you were?
There were parts of me that became stronger through motherhood.
There were things I became less willing to tolerate.
There were relationships I began to see differently.
There were priorities that suddenly seemed far less important and others that became almost impossibly important.
And there were also times when I wasn’t entirely sure where I had gone.
Research into women’s identity after becoming mothers has found something similar. Women have described periods of feeling that they had lost themselves while trying to incorporate motherhood into who they were. But the research suggests something more complicated than simple loss: our identities can also expand and be reconstructed through motherhood.
I like that distinction.
Because I don’t think motherhood simply erased the woman I had been.
Nor do I think the answer is necessarily to get back to her.
I’m not sure she exists anymore.
And perhaps she isn’t supposed to.
The pressure to come back
There is a phrase we use around motherhood that I’ve become increasingly curious about.
Getting back.
Getting your body back.
Getting back into your clothes.
Getting back to exercise.
Getting back to work.
Getting your relationship back.
Getting back to feeling like yourself.
Even during pregnancy, before the baby has arrived, it can feel as though part of us is already wondering how quickly we’ll be able to undo the evidence that any of it happened.
And I wonder what that does to us.
Pregnancy itself can be difficult enough to inhabit.
Your body changes before your eyes. It can begin to feel unfamiliar. People may look at it differently, comment on it and sometimes behave as though pregnancy has somehow made your body public property.
And even when a pregnancy is desperately wanted, that doesn’t mean every woman automatically feels comfortable with what is happening to her body.
You can be grateful to be pregnant and frightened by pregnancy.
You can marvel at what your body is doing and struggle with how it looks.
You can love the baby growing inside you and still miss the body that used to feel familiar.
Those things are not contradictions.
They are different truths occupying the same woman.
Yet I think many of us carry an expectation that we should enjoy pregnancy. That we should feel beautiful. That we should embrace our changing bodies because of what they are doing.
And then, almost immediately afterwards, another expectation appears.
Now become yourself again.
But which self?
The expectations nobody has to say out loud
Perhaps some of the hardest expectations around motherhood are the ones nobody has actually said to us.
Nobody needs to stand in front of you and tell you that you should lose the pregnancy weight, be grateful, enjoy every minute, keep your relationship alive, return to work, maintain your friendships, look after yourself, be present with your children and somehow remain recognisably the woman you were before.
We have absorbed so much of it already.
From the families we grew up in.
From other women.
From advertising.
From photographs.
From social media.
From the way women’s bodies are discussed.
From watching what happens to women when they become mothers.
And sometimes the person applying the greatest pressure is ourselves.
That can make the pressure particularly difficult to question because it doesn’t necessarily feel like pressure.
It can simply feel like failure.
Why am I not enjoying this more?
Why don’t I recognise my body?
Why don’t I want sex yet?
Why does work feel different?
Why am I so angry?
Why can’t I cope when everybody else seems to be coping?
Why don’t I feel like myself?
Perhaps some of those questions deserve another question alongside them:
Who taught me how I was supposed to feel?
Motherhood doesn’t happen to your body and nowhere else
Our bodies may be the most visible evidence of becoming mothers, but they are certainly not the only things that change.
Work can feel different.
Friendships can feel different.
Our relationships with our own mothers can change.
Ambition can change.
Money can suddenly mean something different.
Our tolerance for certain relationships or behaviours may change.
Things we once accepted without much thought can become impossible to ignore.
And our relationship with the person we are raising a child with can change too.
When two people become parents
Before children, you are a couple.
Then suddenly there is another person at the centre of your lives who is completely dependent on you.
Particularly with a new baby, that child can become the organising principle of the relationship.
Who is feeding the baby?
Who is getting up?
When did the baby last sleep?
Have we got enough nappies?
When is the next appointment?
Conversations that once belonged to two people can become almost entirely about a third.
And I don’t necessarily think there is anything wrong with that.
There are periods of family life when a child simply does need to occupy an enormous amount of space.
What I find interesting is what happens afterwards.
At some point, couples may begin finding their way towards each other again — not only as Mum and Dad, but as the two people who existed before they became parents.
There doesn’t seem to be one timetable for that.
For some couples it may happen quite naturally. For others it can take much longer. Sometimes one person may be ready before the other.
And even within the same relationship, it may not happen in the same way after every baby.
Every child arrives into a different version of a family.
Different circumstances. Different pressures. Different recovery. Different needs. Perhaps older children who need you too.
So I’m not sure “getting your relationship back” quite describes it either.
Perhaps, like so much else after children, the question is what your relationship looks like now.
There can be grief in becoming a mother too
There is another part of this transformation that I think can be difficult to say out loud.
Sometimes we miss the life we had before our children.
Not because we wish our children weren’t here.
Not because we aren’t grateful for them.
Simply because something was lost when something extraordinary was gained.
I don’t think I understood how much freedom I had before I became a mother.
Perhaps that’s because I didn’t experience it as freedom then.
It was simply my life.
I could leave the house without thinking about what another person might need while I was gone.
I could be tired and go to bed.
I could make plans and change them.
I could travel differently.
Spend a day doing very little.
Make decisions primarily according to what I wanted.
There was a kind of levity to life that I don’t think I recognised until it was gone.
Because once you become responsible for another human being, even when they aren’t physically with you, some part of that responsibility travels with you.
There is someone to consider.
Someone to worry about.
Someone whose wellbeing matters to you in a way that can feel almost inseparable from your own.
And I think there can be grief in that.
We don’t often use the word grief when something wonderful has happened.
But perhaps we should.
Because joy and grief aren’t opposites.
You can be overwhelmingly grateful for the life you have created and occasionally ache for the freedom of the one you left behind.
You can adore your children and miss waking up with nobody needing you.
You can love the depth motherhood has brought to your life and sometimes miss its former lightness.
You can know with absolute certainty that you would choose your children again and still mourn parts of the woman and the life that existed before them.
I think many mothers are frightened of admitting that.
Perhaps because motherhood is still surrounded by the idea that gratitude should cancel out every other feeling.
You wanted this.
You are lucky.
They won’t be little forever.
All of those things may be true.
And you can still miss what you had.
One feeling doesn’t invalidate the other.
Perhaps part of becoming a mother is learning to hold both.
The extraordinary joy of what arrived.
And the quiet grief for some of what had to make room for it.
Maybe you haven’t lost yourself
When women say, “I don’t know who I am anymore,” our instinct is often to assume something has gone wrong.
We talk about finding yourself again.
Getting the old you back.
Returning to the things you used to enjoy.
And sometimes that may be exactly what you need.
There may be parts of yourself that have been neglected for too long and that you desperately want to reclaim.
But I wonder whether there is another possibility too.
Perhaps some of the discomfort comes from trying to recognise ourselves using an old map.
Something enormous has happened.
Your body may have changed.
Your priorities may have changed.
Your relationship may have changed.
Your understanding of love, fear, responsibility and vulnerability may have changed.
What you want from work may have changed.
What you’re prepared to tolerate may have changed.
You have changed.
And perhaps one of the hardest things about becoming a mother is that we are undergoing an enormous transformation while receiving a thousand quiet messages suggesting that the successful outcome is to emerge from it looking remarkably similar to the woman who went in.
What if we stopped trying to go back?
There are parts of the woman I was before children that I treasure.
There are parts of her I miss.
There are parts I have found again over the years.
And there are parts of her that I have no desire to recover.
Motherhood hasn’t made me better in every way.
It hasn’t made me endlessly patient or selfless or wise.
It has made me more complicated.
It has exposed things in me.
It has strengthened some parts and challenged others.
It has changed what I value and forced me to look at things I might otherwise never have questioned.
And perhaps that’s why I have become less interested in the idea of getting back.
Back to my old body.
Back to my old priorities.
Back to my old relationship.
Back to the woman I was.
There may be grief in acknowledging that some things have changed.
There can also be possibility.
Because perhaps you haven’t failed to find your way back.
Perhaps you’ve gone somewhere.
And maybe the more interesting question isn’t:
How do I get the old me back?
Maybe it’s:
Who am I becoming now?.
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.