I've been waiting four years to share this

It's a ...

What do you do when you don’t recognize yourself?

Splayed on the couch with my sleeping newborn draped across my chest, I watched yellow and black wings flicker outside the window as butterflies migrated through our front yard—which at this point felt like a distant, foreign land. I looked down at the feet propped on the footrest, which apparently were mine. In the flurry of newborn care as we left the hospital, nobody told me they’d swell like overstuffed sausages with retained fluid following my emergency C-section. (I’ll spare you photos—it was painful. I thought they’d burst like balloons.)

No part of me felt like myself. My face looked fatter and the only clothes I could wear were stretched-out dresses I would never have picked if anything else had felt comfortable. It felt like years since I’d left the couch, pumping around the clock trying to encourage milk production. With a July heatwave, it was only possible to venture outdoors in the early morning, when I also felt most exhausted from feeding and rocking through the night.

With one hand, I picked up the book sitting on the coffee table, something I’d bought to give my parents—a keepsake guided journal for them to fill out and give to my son, sharing the story of who they are. But reading the prompts about fond childhood memories, favorite music, books and cherished family traditions, I started to want a book like that for myself. Not to give to my son—but to remind myself who I am.

So I started writing one.

At first it was quick thoughts typed one-handed in the notes app on my phone. Later they became sticky notes, and then a Word doc. I needed to know: How do you stay you when your name becomes “mom”?

A late bloomer in general, I didn’t get around to motherhood until I was 40. And with all the excitement and unknowns of pregnancy and childbirth, one aspect had particularly unsettled me: How would I keep from “losing myself” in motherhood?

I worried how I’d handle the sudden lack of freedom and autonomy. Would I have time and mental space for the writing and reading that felt so essential to my life? (And who would I be without it?) Would I still be able to run? How would this affect my relationship with my husband?

With the median age for giving birth in the U.S. higher than ever, many women have more time to develop as individuals before committing to motherhood. To get degrees, build careers, develop meaningful hobbies and relationships. We’re told that motherhood shouldn’t limit us in any of these areas—we should be able to “have it all.” And I blithely tried to assure myself I could, too. I wouldn’t let motherhood change me.

Only a couple weeks into motherhood, though, precious little felt like it hadn’t changed—or at least been put on a very long-term pause. I grasped at little things that helped me feel grounded. Like wearing a pair of beloved turquoise earrings every day even if all I wore with them was the same baggy, stretched-out sundress. I drove to the nearest place where I could step in a creek, desperate to connect with nature, to remember what it felt like. The limitations of healing from a C-section birth added an unexpected sense of isolation, and the mental stress of learning to care for a newborn felt unrelenting.

I’d spent my entire pregnancy reading about childbirth and studying how to soothe a crying baby—but I hadn’t read a thing about how to keep my own footing as an individual while the flash flood of new motherhood washed through.

Science writer Lucy Jones compares the process of becoming a mother to a caterpillar becoming a butterfly—and not in the cheesy way. Encased in its cocoon, the caterpillar’s body literally digests itself, enzymes breaking down its tissues into an unrecognizable goo which is rebuilt into the body of the butterfly from scratch.

I wish I’d read that metaphor before I went through my own unrecognizable-goo phase. But it would be two more years before Jones’s book Matrescence came out. With it, she introduced a whole generation of women to the concept of matrescence—the transition to motherhood—as a dramatic change similar to adolescence, with seismic effects that go mostly ignored by culture in general.

Piling books in stacks by my bedside, I spent the first years of my son’s life searching for how to be a good mom to him—and how to be myself as a mom. I found way more about the former, but also discovered a groundswell of resources and women dedicated to helping new moms navigate this huge life transition. It wasn’t just me, I learned—matrescence is a big deal. I just had no idea until I was in it.

But the thing is, even if I’d had all those books at hand for support when I came home from the hospital, I wouldn’t have had time or energy to read them. Confined to my bed and trying to care for a newborn following major surgery, I was barely getting by. Which is why those guided journals I got for my parents struck a chord.

I ordered a few postpartum journals, and a few other guided journals. But none of them was focused on the mother’s sense of self in the way that I craved. So I began compiling all those sticky notes and—very slowly over the past four years—created the book I wish I’d had.

I wanted a journal filled with quick prompts you could pick up for just a few seconds at a time to be reminded of the unique individual deep inside you. I wanted to fill it with the most useful highlights from all the books and research about matrescence I’d combed through. I wanted it to be something a mom could flip through while pumping or sitting on the toilet and set it down feeling seen and a little bit more like herself.

Doula and coach Jessie Harrold writes that the transition to motherhood isn’t over once you become pregnant or give birth—or even after the so-called fourth trimester. It takes more like two to three years. As I write this, I’m four years into motherhood and it has changed me.

Physically, I’ll never be the same as I was pre-pregnancy. And I do have less time for reading, writing and running, which forces me to be more purposeful. My writing feels more meaningful these days and I’m a stronger runner now because I’m more intentional. Matrescence burned away the dross in my life and, in many ways, I feel more solid and true to myself than ever before.

Jungian analyst and author Lisa Marchiano writes, “Motherhood, with its intense physical and emotional extremes, is a crucible in which we are tested and altered. In the alchemical vessel of motherhood, the heat is turned up high. Outdated parts of our personality are melted away and new structures are formed.”

I’m thrilled to finally share this book I’ve been working on—it’s called “How to Stay You When Your Name Becomes Mom” and it’s available as a paperback and also an email subscription, which is 75 prompts, stories and bite-sized resources delivered daily to your inbox.

My hope is that while new moms are in the cocoon (or, unrecognizable goo) phase of motherhood, this journal can help them hang on to the things that matter most to them, so they can come out the other side even stronger, shinier and truer to themselves as a whole person.