There are times when being needed feels like love.
Your child looking for you in a crowded room. A friend calling because you’re the person she wants to talk to. Someone you love knowing that if something goes wrong, they can come to you.
There is something beautiful about being important in other people’s lives.
But I have also wondered what happens when being needed becomes so ordinary that you barely notice how much of your attention is permanently turned outwards.
Who needs collecting.
Who needs feeding.
What needs remembering.
What needs buying.
Who hasn’t replied.
Who seems unusually quiet.
What needs sorting before tomorrow.
None of these things, individually, feels particularly enormous.
Perhaps that’s partly why the weight of them can be so difficult to explain.
And somewhere amongst all that noticing, I sometimes wonder:
How often do we remember to notice ourselves?
Motherhood doesn’t give us a new personality
We become mothers with all the history and personality we had before our children arrived.
Motherhood doesn’t hand us a baby and an entirely new personality to go with it.
And I think that’s something we don’t talk about very much.
Perhaps you were always confident.
Perhaps you were decisive and trusted yourself. You were comfortable saying no. You didn’t mind disagreeing with people.
But perhaps you weren’t.
Perhaps you arrived at motherhood already carrying self-doubt.
Perhaps you were shy.
Perhaps you had spent much of your life worrying about getting things wrong.
Perhaps you avoided confrontation, looked to other people for reassurance or found it difficult to ask for what you needed.
And then you have a baby.
Suddenly, you are the mother.
People ask you questions as though something happened during birth that also delivered an entirely new level of certainty.
Is the baby hungry?
Is that rash normal?
Should they be sleeping more?
Are you going to breastfeed?
When will you introduce solids?
Which nursery?
Which school?
Should we call the doctor?
What are you going to do?
And sometimes you don’t know.
Of course you don’t know.
You have never mothered this child before.
But somehow you have become the person everybody expects to know.
The role can ask something enormous of the woman
Motherhood can require us to become extraordinarily visible.
To advocate.
To decide.
To protect.
To tolerate other people’s opinions.
To disagree when something doesn’t feel right.
To make decisions without ever having all the information.
To say no.
To disappoint people.
To decide what is right for our family when somebody else thinks we are getting it wrong.
That can be difficult even for a naturally confident woman.
But I sometimes wonder what it feels like for the woman who never thought of herself that way at all.
The woman who has always questioned herself.
The woman who has always been frightened of upsetting people.
The woman who learned somewhere along the way that keeping everybody else happy was safer than saying what she really wanted.
Now she isn’t only making decisions for herself.
Another human being depends on her.
Perhaps part of the exhaustion of motherhood isn’t simply everything there is to do.
Perhaps sometimes it is the distance between how certain the role seems to require us to be and how uncertain we may feel inside it.
And yet sometimes we surprise ourselves
There is another side to this.
Motherhood can ask things of us that we didn’t know we were capable of giving.
I’ve watched women who struggle to speak up for themselves become extraordinarily clear when somebody needs to speak up for their child.
A woman who would once have worried for days about offending somebody may suddenly find herself saying:
No.
That doesn’t work for us.
I don’t think that’s right.
I want another opinion.
Something is wrong.
Please listen to me.
Not because motherhood magically removes insecurity.
It doesn’t.
But sometimes responsibility forces us to discover abilities we hadn’t needed to use before.
And gradually, perhaps, something shifts.
You begin to know your child.
You begin to recognise what different cries mean.
You notice when something isn’t quite right.
You make a decision and discover that it was a good one.
You get something wrong and discover that the world doesn’t end.
You learn.
And somewhere amongst all of that, perhaps you begin to trust yourself a little more.
Not because you suddenly know everything.
But because you begin to understand that perhaps you were never supposed to.
The things nobody sees
Then there is another kind of responsibility.
The things that don’t necessarily look like work.
Remembering that one child needs something for school on Thursday.
Noticing that somebody’s shoes are becoming too small.
Knowing which food is about to run out.
Remembering the birthday party.
Booking the dentist.
Realising that one child has been quieter than usual.
Thinking about whether everybody has enough clean clothes for tomorrow.
Knowing that somebody needs a new coat before they have noticed it themselves.
Remembering which friend your child has fallen out with and asking carefully how things are going without making it obvious that you’re checking.
It isn’t only doing.
It is noticing, anticipating and remembering.
And because so much of it happens inside our heads, it can be difficult even to explain why we feel tired.
You might be sitting on the sofa.
But your mind isn’t necessarily sitting with you.
When being capable creates more responsibility
There is something else I think is worth being curious about.
Sometimes we become the person who does everything partly because we are good at doing things.
We notice.
We remember.
We sort things out.
We know where things are.
And eventually everybody else knows that too.
So they ask us.
And perhaps we complain that everybody asks us while simultaneously making it very difficult for anybody else to take over.
Because they won’t do it the way we would.
Because explaining it takes longer than doing it ourselves.
Because they might forget.
Because if something important doesn’t happen, we know who will ultimately have to deal with the consequences.
Sometimes stepping in feels easier than stepping back.
And then competence can quietly become responsibility.
Responsibility becomes expectation.
And expectation becomes:
Mum will know.
There can be love in that.
There can also be weight.
When everyone comes to you
There are practical needs, and then there are emotional ones.
Children don’t only need food and clean clothes and lifts.
They bring us their disappointments.
Their friendship problems.
Their worries.
Their anger.
Their questions.
Sometimes their biggest feelings arrive when we have the least capacity to receive them.
And the people around us may need us too.
A partner who wants to talk.
A parent who needs help.
A friend having a difficult time.
Work that requires something.
Messages waiting for replies.
None of these people is necessarily doing anything wrong.
That’s important.
This isn’t about turning everyone around us into demanding people and ourselves into exhausted martyrs.
Most of the time, these are simply people we love.
And being there for them is part of the richness of having relationships at all.
But even things we value can become heavy when there is no space between them.
You can love being the person your child comes to and occasionally wish nobody would say your name for twenty minutes.
Those things can coexist.
Sometimes what we want isn’t rest
We talk a lot about mothers needing a break.
And of course sometimes we do.
But I’m not sure a break always describes what we are longing for.
Because you can be sitting alone with a cup of tea while remembering the form that needs signing.
You can be having dinner with friends while wondering whether everybody got to bed.
You can be away for a weekend and still be answering messages about where something is.
Your body may have stopped.
Responsibility hasn’t necessarily stopped with it.
Perhaps sometimes what we are craving isn’t simply rest.
It is the temporary experience of being responsible only for ourselves.
To eat because we’re hungry.
To sleep because we’re tired.
To go somewhere without calculating what everybody else needs first.
To make one decision without considering five other people.
Perhaps that’s why an hour alone doesn’t always restore us in the way we expect it to.
Sometimes it isn’t time we’re short of.
It’s space inside our own heads.
Sometimes I want to be mothered too
There is something else I have noticed as I’ve got older.
I am 53 now. My children are teenagers. I am divorced, and I have been a mother for long enough that you might imagine I would feel completely established in the role.
And still, there are days when I miss my mother.
Not only because I miss her.
Sometimes I miss being mothered.
I spend so much of my life thinking about my children. How they are feeling. What they need. Whether they are okay. What I can do to help. When to step in and when to leave them alone.
And sometimes I wish there were still somebody doing a little of that for me.
Someone who knew me well enough to hear something in my voice and ask, Are you okay?
Someone I didn’t have to be strong for.
Someone who, just for a moment, made me feel that I wasn’t the person responsible for holding everything together.
In my years working as a maternity nurse, I’ve also learned that this isn’t simply about whether our mothers are still here.
I have cared for women whose mothers were very much alive, but who didn’t have that kind of relationship with them.
And in those first vulnerable weeks of motherhood, I sometimes found myself caring not only for the baby, but mothering the mother too.
Making sure she had eaten.
Noticing when she was exhausted.
Listening when she needed to talk.
Reassuring her when she doubted herself.
Sometimes simply being the person who noticed that she needed looking after as well.
Perhaps that’s what I’ve come to understand about being mothered.
It doesn’t have to come from our mothers.
For some of us it does.
For others, it might come from a sister, a friend, a partner, another woman, or someone who enters our life at precisely the moment we need them.
Maybe being mothered isn’t a relationship at all.
Maybe it is an experience of being cared for.
Of somebody noticing you.
Of being allowed, occasionally, to be the one who doesn’t know.
The one who doesn’t organise.
The one who doesn’t hold everything.
We spend so much time talking about how mothers care for everyone else. Perhaps we need to talk more about who is mothering the mother.
Because I don’t think we ever entirely outgrow the need to feel that somebody is looking after us too.
When resentment appears
And perhaps this is where resentment sometimes enters.
Resentment can be uncomfortable to admit, particularly when the people we resent are people we love.
But perhaps resentment isn’t always evidence that we have become ungrateful or selfish.
Perhaps sometimes it is information.
Maybe there is too much being carried.
Maybe we have been saying yes when we wanted to say no.
Maybe somebody else genuinely needs to take more responsibility.
Maybe we have assumed responsibility nobody actually asked us to take.
Maybe we don’t trust anyone else to do it.
Maybe we have become so accustomed to anticipating everybody else’s needs that we no longer know what ours are until we’re angry.
There isn’t one explanation.
And that’s what interests me.
Rather than immediately asking, How do I stop feeling this?, perhaps there is something useful in asking:
What is this feeling trying to show me?
Who were you before everyone needed you?
Perhaps this is where the woman who existed before motherhood matters again.
Not because we need to return to her.
But because she may tell us something about how we arrived here.
Were you always the responsible one?
Were you the peacemaker?
Were you the person who looked after everybody?
Did you find it difficult to say no long before you had children?
Did being useful make you feel valuable?
Or was the opposite true?
Were you independent and spontaneous, accustomed to answering only to yourself, and motherhood required a kind of constant responsibility that felt completely foreign?
Were you someone who doubted herself, and suddenly found herself responsible for decisions that mattered enormously?
There are so many different women entering motherhood.
Why would we expect the experience of being needed to feel the same for all of them?
Perhaps motherhood doesn’t create all these patterns.
Sometimes it simply makes them much harder to ignore.
What has being needed asked you to become?
I don’t want to romanticise being needed.
But I don’t want to make it sound like something we should escape either.
Some of the greatest love I have experienced exists precisely because there are people whose lives are intertwined with mine.
There is privilege in being trusted.
There is intimacy in knowing somebody deeply enough to notice when something is wrong.
There is something extraordinary about being the person a child believes can make the world safe again.
But perhaps being there for everybody doesn’t have to require disappearing from ourselves.
Maybe the question isn’t:
How do I get everybody to stop needing me?
Perhaps the more interesting questions are:
What am I carrying because it genuinely belongs to me?
What am I carrying because I’ve become accustomed to carrying it?
Where do I find it difficult to let somebody else take responsibility?
What do I need that I rarely say out loud?
Where might I trust myself more?
Where might I allow somebody else to step in?
And who have I become through all the things motherhood has asked of me?
Because motherhood doesn’t give us a new personality.
But it can put the personality we already have under extraordinary pressure.
It can expose our fears.
Our habits.
Our need for control.
Our difficulty saying no.
Our capacity.
Our courage.
And sometimes, somewhere amongst everybody else’s needs, we discover parts of ourselves that we didn’t know were there.
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.