When it comes to having a baby, we’re typically in one-sided conversations.
We talk about what size fruit the baby is in the womb and the brackets of age they’ll be in for clothes as they grow. We celebrate their arrival with baby shower cupcakes and rituals and take pictures as they develop teeth, dimples and rolls. We watch their neonatal acne come and go, their hair poke through in patches and light up when smiles consciously appear in reaction to our cooing voice. We notice their every change and the world comments on their evolution right alongside us.
But we miss something major, something essential and something right in front of us.
Ourselves.
When a child is born, so are we!
We are now mothers.
Two births have happened, yet our culture’s eye is trained to only acknowledge and see one as the big event.
We’re the vehicle that simply “bounces back” to its previous iteration and goes on ticking, as if creating a child was a physical act that didn’t travel to the mind, the heart or the soul of ourselves. It leaves us to navigate our way through an unspoken falsehood that we as individuals are unaffected, only added onto.
Yet, while we wrestle with a rapidly shifting physical self, we’re also sifting through an entirely new psychological, mental, emotional and spiritual state nobody talks about. We’re led to believe we can just pick up where we left off as who we were before – go back to ‘normal’, when in fact, we have been reborn ourselves.
We call it The Motherhood Identity Shift™
Becoming a mother is one of the biggest internal transitions you can go through, and it requires graciously letting go of your past identity to step into your new one. It takes the understanding that when one version of you ends, you might be in the neutral zone, on the bridge between, before you feel fully like the new you.
So, take some time to acknowledge and grieve who you were before, to embody this transition at the pace and style that feels truest to you, and when you feel ready, to step forward.
Breathe easy knowing you’re meant to change, but it can feel so much easier when there’s a name for it.
You can learn more about this shift on here, but we want to take it one step further.
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