Nobody warned me about the specific grief of losing yourself slowly, in increments so small you barely notice until one day you’re standing in the kitchen at 6:47am, still in yesterday’s clothes, eating a cold piece of toast over the sink, and you realize you cannot remember the last time you sat down for a meal without one eye on a small person who might tip something over.
That is motherhood. That is also, somehow, the life I chose and would choose again.
But when someone asks me if it’s worth it, I find myself pausing in a way I never used to. Because the honest answer is not a clean yes. It’s not a martyred no either. It’s something murkier and more interesting than either of those, and I think we do a disservice to everyone when we flatten it into a feel-good bumper sticker.
What I actually gave up
Let me be specific, because vague sacrifices are easy to romanticize.
I gave up career momentum at a point when things were moving well. Not completely, but I dialed back in a real way. My husband and I made a deliberate choice when I got pregnant: one of us needed to push hard professionally to get our family to the financial position we wanted, and one of us needed to hold down the home. We chose him for the push and me for the hold. That was a conscious, mutual decision. It still cost me something.
I gave up sleep in a way I did not fully comprehend before living it. I knew I would be tired. I did not know that a specific kind of delirium sets in when you have been sleep-deprived for eighteen months straight, where you find yourself Googling something and completely forgetting what it was before the page even loads.
I gave up my body, at least temporarily. I am currently pregnant with our second daughter, due in July, which will make two children under two. The weight gain has been significant and fast, and even though I know it is temporary, even though I do my spinning classes three times a week at lunch and feel proud of that consistency, some mornings I look in the mirror and have to consciously remind myself this is not permanent. It is humbling in a way that is hard to describe without sounding like I am complaining, and I am not complaining. But I am also not pretending it is fine when sometimes it is just hard.
I gave up the version of friendship that requires spontaneity and availability. My closest friends are scattered across time zones. The ones here in São Paulo are wonderful, but we all have full lives and scheduling something requires a calendar negotiation that would have seemed absurd to my twenty-three-year-old self.
I gave up long stretches of time alone. The kind where you have no particular agenda and nowhere to be and no one needing anything from you. I did not realize how much I had taken those hours for granted until they disappeared.
What nobody tells you about the trade
Here is the part that confuses people when I try to explain it.
I do not regret any of it. Not in the way you might expect given that list. The loss is real and I can hold it clearly and still feel that way. Both things are simultaneously true.
What I think happens is that parenthood recalibrates what satisfaction feels like. Before my daughter arrived, satisfaction came from achievement, from ticking things off, from building something and seeing it grow. Those things still matter to me. But now there is a different category of experience that did not exist before, and it operates on a frequency I could not have accessed any other way.
It is not sentimentality. I am not someone who cries at school plays or describes my child as my whole world in a way that erases everything else. I still need my work to feel meaningful, my marriage to feel alive, my friendships to feel real. My daughter does not complete me. She added a dimension to me.
But that dimension is significant. Watching a small person become themselves, being the one they reach for when they are scared, having a front row seat to the specific miracle of a developing human who did not exist two years ago and now has opinions about which cup she drinks from and breaks into full body laughter at the dog across the street. There is nothing comparable to that. Not in my experience.
The question behind the question
When people ask if parenthood is worth it, I think what they are often really asking is: will I lose myself? Will I disappear? Will the person I’ve worked to become get swallowed by this role?
The honest answer is: a version of you will. That version is not gone forever, but you will be different. The question is whether you can build something new that has room for who you were and who you are becoming.
I moved around a lot before settling in São Paulo. Central Asia, Malaysia, Chile, different countries and cultures and languages and versions of myself. Each place asked me to adapt. Each one cost me something and gave me something. I know how to lose a version of myself and find the next one. Parenthood felt, in some ways, like another migration.
The people I see struggling most are the ones who expected parenthood to simply add to their existing life without requiring anything to shift. That expectation is the source of the confusion, not the reality of the experience itself.
On the twenty-year timeline
My husband and I talk sometimes about the phase of life we are in. We are in the thick of it: full-time work, a toddler, a second baby coming, a household that requires constant coordination. We live on structure because without it the whole thing would collapse. We protect our weekly dinners alone together. We protect the morning walk when we drop him at the office and talk about our day before it starts. These small rituals are not extras. They are load-bearing.
We have also made our peace with the fact that this specific season is demanding, and we will not have it forever. The kids will grow. They will need us differently. The sleepless phase ends. The all-consuming physical dependence phase ends. What we are building now, the habits and the family culture and the sense of security we are trying to give these girls, that will outlast this phase and matter long after it.
Twenty years is a long time. But it moves quickly, everyone who is past it says so. I am trying to be present enough to believe them.
Final thoughts
If you ask me whether parenthood is worth it, I will not tell you yes in the way that shuts down the conversation. I will tell you it is the most interesting, most disorienting, most demanding thing I have done. I will tell you it changed my sense of what mattering means. I will tell you I am tired in a bone-deep way and also more rooted than I have ever been.
I will tell you that I am doing spinning classes while pregnant and eating well and trying to hold onto myself inside this enormous transition, and that some days that works better than others.
I will tell you that the grief is real and the gain is real and they coexist without canceling each other out.
And I will tell you that for me, with this particular family in this particular life, I would do it again. Not because it is easy or because the sacrifices are not real, but because the thing on the other side of them is something I could not have imagined wanting this much until I had it.
That is the honest answer. I told you it would confuse you.
