Is losing yourself in motherhood part of the package?

I hate the phrase “I’m just a mum.” Nothing this hard is anything just.

I type this in between gaps in time as I rock one twin in their bouncer and incite laughter in the other and in this moment I realise there’s nothing ‘just’ about motherhood.

There’s nothing just about 2am breastfeeding sessions and powerful letdowns, the first walk after my c-section or the heaviness that sits in the depths of holding the mental load. There’s nothing just about being a caretaker, organiser, nurturer, life giver.

"Just"

Based on the second definition of just, I am exactly, entirely and completely a mother. When I first read this definition, it felt enlightening — beautiful almost. To have your entire being re-defined and reshaped, like clay being sculpted and made into something new. When I read the definition now, it feels suffocating.

Not many things can grasp just how all-encompassing motherhood is, and to an extent, how suffocating this can be at times. To be “all” of something to someone means for seconds and minutes and hours and days, my mere being exists solely within the maternal, making it easy to forget where “mummy” ends and I begin. That before I was “mummy,” I was me.

And don’t get me wrong, I love being a mum (and I hate that I have to clarify that as if disliking parts of motherhood makes me a bad mother). I love watching these tiny humans that I spent 9 months growing become their own people, with their own voices and smiles that reach their eyes. I love the static electricity that courses through me, connecting our souls as our hands interlink. I love their laughter. I love lovingthem.

I don’t love early mornings that come after a hard night of waking and stirring and barely sleeping. I don’t love the guilt that lives at the base of my stomach whenever I feel not enough. I don’t love the mental load and the “when did they wake from their nap and what should we do for the day and i need to book their doctor’s appointment and their birthday is coming soon i need to shop for that and…” breathe.

It’s easy to lose yourself in this part of motherhood.

The part of motherhood that asks you to pour and pour until all that remains for you are mere droplets, and I know this because it happened/is happening to me. It started off with “I’ll shower tomorrow,” and became “when was the last time I did my skincare or read a book?” I sometimes look in the mirror and while I recognise the shape of her face and the lines by her eyes, I don’t always recognise her. Me.

The person staring back at me — with a puke stained shirt and engorged breast that somehow seems to leak through her breast pads — seems far away from the person I know her to be. And yet, I feel for her. The woman who is giving every inch of herself even when there is nothing left to give.

I grew a child and shrunk myself. One might say that this is everything to do with duty and obligation. I say it’s everything to do with love and loss and patience and grief and an infinite number of words and feelings that often can’t be expressed with ease.

There is an ache that exists deep within me. a calling towards the me I was before I became needed. Before I became mother, maternal, matriarch. This ache isn’t always loud, but a tap on my shoulder or a tightness in my gut. And when I feel it, I hate the guilt that comes with it. The guilt that says in wanting to discover the parts of me that have been buried at the back of my mind that I am choosing to be less of a mother. In taking away the just, a part of my maternal is stripped away.

And yet, while I used to sit with this turmoil — this ache between existing and searching, living and longing — I now say fuck it. It doesn’t feel just that as women — as mothers — we have to choose when they don’t have to. Fathers seldom face the dilemma of losing themselves in parenthood or retaining their identity. The phrase “behind every successful man is a woman” always got to me for this reason, because in so many instances, behind a successful woman is often their own shadow.

I’ve not admitted out loud that I want to be on television in some capacity one day. And become an author. And a model. A creator. A speaker. I want to be all of these things on top of being a mother. There, i’ve said it. In a world where mothers are told to choose, I want it all. And here is how I’m going to do it:

1. First of all, I’m putting my middle finger up to the guilt of pursuit and allowing myself to chase the life I want to live.

2. I’m doing one thing for me each day. It doesn’t have to be anything big or grandiose, but it has to be for me.

3. Saying no a lot more (because setting boundaries is sexy).

4. Trying to go outside once a day, even when the depression makes my bones feel stiff and unmoving.

5. I wish I could write ‘to get more sleep’, but as a mother to a highly attuned and energetic four year old as well as two newborn-ish twins, it seems as if sleep deprivation is currently part of the package. So instead, I want to rest more without feeling like I have to earn it. And when I say rest, I don’t mean in the doomscrolling-on-the-bed type of rest (because I always leave more anxious and unsettled after one of those sessions), but in the quieten-the-mind type of way.

6. Lastly, and this is the most important one: in a world where we are afraid to be seen trying, I am choosing to let rejection and embarrassment win. Fuck the fear.

In choosing motherhood, I’ve decided that I’m also choosing me. At the end of the day, no one can pour from an empty cup, and as much as we like to call mothers superhuman, we’re not. We deserve to put ourselves first too, so let’s start there