The version of motherhood we talk about openly tends to flatten something. You are either grateful or overwhelmed, fulfilled or depleted, growing or grieving. The mess gets cleaned up for the story. What rarely gets said — and what I have come to believe is the most accurate thing about the experience — is that both sides show up at the same time, sometimes within the same hour, and that having no language for that is part of what makes it so disorienting.
The story we’re allowed to tell
The culture around motherhood has always preferred a single narrative. Either it is the making of you — the thing that gives your life its shape and meaning — or it quietly unmakes you, stealing your autonomy and your former self piece by piece. The positive version gets pressed onto new cards and coffee mugs. The negative version gets whispered between mothers who trust each other enough to be honest.
Neither is wrong, exactly. But both are incomplete. They leave out the third thing, which is the one that is hardest to say: that parenting doesn’t resolve your sense of self in either direction. It holds both outcomes at once.
The Artful Age
A weekly letter on aging well, family across generations, and the creative life after the kids leave home.
There is a word for the transition to motherhood — matrescence — coined in the 1970s by medical anthropologist Dana Raphael and revived in recent years by Aurelie Athan, a reproductive psychologist at Columbia University. The comparison Athan draws is to adolescence — another developmental shift that nobody would describe as purely good or purely bad. As she puts it in an NPR interview, it is “a holistic change in multiple domains of your life. You’re going to feel it perhaps bodily, psychologically. You’re going to feel it with your peer groups. You’re going to feel it at your job. You’re going to feel it in terms of the big philosophical questions.” What she is describing, and what mothers have been navigating without language for it for generations, is exactly this: not a single transformation in one direction, but a simultaneous pulling in two.
What parenting surfaces that was already in you
There is a category of self-knowledge you cannot arrive at any other way. You do not discover certain things about yourself by thinking, or by trying, or by asking. You discover them by being put in a situation that demands them and finding out what you actually do.
For me, the clearest version of this happened with my son Dylan, who is in special education and has specific learning needs that standard approaches don’t always reach. Early on, I started doing something I hadn’t consciously planned: I began adapting ideas from my advertising and training background — the creative instincts, the way I used to build campaigns or design workshops — into tools that could help him learn. Breaking concepts into images. Finding the angle that made something click. It wasn’t a methodology. It was just me, figuring it out. And what surprised me was how completely it felt like myself. Not like a parent doing a good job, but like a specific version of me — the one who had spent twenty years finding ways to communicate things — finally being useful in a different register.
This is the part that gets underreported: parenting doesn’t only add responsibilities. For many women, it also surfaces capacities they didn’t know they had in that particular form. The patience I have learned with Dylan is not the same patience I might have developed elsewhere. It is deeper and stranger and more specific than that. I didn’t know it was in me until the situation required it.
Athan writes that “ambivalence can be the hallmark of motherhood, and becoming a mother is both stressful and growth-producing.” The growth part is real. It is just that it often arrives alongside the hardest parts, which makes it easy to miss or to discount.
What parenting takes from a version of you
The loss is also real, and it deserves equal air time.
I ran a boutique advertising agency for twenty years. That was not just a job description — it was the primary container for how I understood my own competence. The identity of someone who builds things, who runs something, who is known professionally for a skill set, is not a thin or interchangeable thing. When I stepped back from that world to focus on the family, what I gained in presence I partially traded for something I had not expected to miss as much as I did: the version of myself that existed on its own terms, separate from anyone else’s needs. If that particular kind of loss is sitting heavily for you, speaking to a therapist who works with mothers in career transition is worth more than any amount of reframing.
This experience is documented in the research, though the evidence is still being built. A 2025 qualitative study published in Frontiers in Psychology — interviewing five urban, educated mothers in Chennai, India — used a phrase drawn directly from participant interviews as its title: “I used to be someone else.” The researchers found that identity disruption persisted even when family support and accommodating workplaces were present, a finding that aligns with wider accounts of this transition even as the study’s small, culturally specific sample limits how far the conclusions can be generalized.
What does seem consistent across accounts is that women who step back from professional life don’t simply pick up where they left off when they return. They reactivate something — a dormant version of themselves. Which implies the version didn’t disappear. It went somewhere. But while it was dormant, they were living in the gap between who they had been and who they were in the process of becoming, and that gap is uncomfortable and real and rarely discussed honestly.
Why having both at once is not a contradiction to fix
The impulse, when you recognize that you are both more yourself and less yourself in the same week, is to try to resolve it. To decide which one is real. To find the framing that makes the two things compatible or to conclude that one of them is wrong.
I’m not a psychologist, but I have come to think that impulse is worth resisting. The ambivalence is not a symptom of something having gone wrong with the transition. It is, to borrow Athan’s word, its hallmark. The expansion is real. The loss is real. They coexist because they are describing different things: what parenting adds to your understanding of who you are, and what it costs in the version of yourself that existed before. Both can be true simultaneously without either canceling the other out.
Pria Alpern, a clinical psychologist who works with new mothers, suggests reframing motherhood as evolution rather than loss. “Self-care is kind of like fueling up your tank,” she notes. “You have to do it so that you can bring your best self to parenthood.” The framing matters: the self you bring is still yours. It has just been somewhere difficult.
An afternoon where you feel completely yourself in one moment and entirely lost in the next is not an afternoon that failed. It is probably a regular afternoon in the long middle of raising children. The grace is in being able to name both things without needing them to become one thing.