There is a particular kind of grief that can come with becoming a mum. It isn’t necessarily grief for your baby-free life. It isn’t regret. And it certainly doesn’t mean you don’t love the life you’ve created.
Sometimes, you simply miss the woman you used to be. The woman who could leave the house without packing half a nursery into a bag. The woman who could make plans without calculating nap times. The woman whose weekends belonged to her. The woman who knew what she liked, what she wanted, where she was going.
Perhaps you miss her confidence. Her spontaneity. Her career. Her friendships. Her body. Her ambitions. Perhaps you even miss the version of yourself who could spend an entire afternoon doing absolutely nothing without feeling that she should be doing something else.
And then comes the guilt.
Because how can you miss parts of your old life when you love your new one so fiercely?Perhaps the answer is that you don’t have to choose.
We talk about becoming a mother as though it happens once
We tend to mark motherhood with a series of obvious milestones: the positive pregnancy test, the birth, the first night at home, the first smile, the first birthday.
But becoming a mum is much bigger and messier than any one of those moments. There is a word for this process: matrescence.
Like adolescence, it describes a period of profound change – physical, emotional, psychological and social – as a woman moves into a new stage of life and develops a new sense of herself.
And increasingly, researchers are exploring motherhood not simply as something that happens to women, but as a process that changes how women understand themselves.
A major UK study published in 2026, Motherhood, Inside Out, describes motherhood as a transformation that can reshape identity, relationships, priorities, values, community and even how women understand the world around them.
That matters because we often talk about maternal wellbeing as though the question is simply: Are you okay? But sometimes the more complicated question is: Who are you now?
You haven’t disappeared
One of the most uncomfortable parts of early motherhood can be the feeling that pieces of your old identity have become harder to access.
Maybe you were ambitious and now your career has stalled. Maybe you were social and now getting out of the house feels like an expedition. Maybe you loved exercise and now your relationship with your body has changed. Maybe you were fiercely independent and now you spend much of your day completely dependent on another person’s needs.
Or maybe you don’t recognise yourself at all. This can feel frightening. But change isn’t the same thing as disappearance.
The woman you were before children hasn’t necessarily gone. Some parts of her may simply be quieter. Some may be waiting for space. Others may have changed beyond recognition. And some parts may have become stronger.
Someone said something to me the other day that really made me stop and think. They told me that I seemed more confident and assertive at work. My first reaction was surprise. Because internally, I don’t necessarily feel like I’ve become a more confident person. If anything, motherhood has given me an entirely new collection of things to worry about. There are days when I question myself constantly.
And yet, perhaps that comment was seeing something I hadn’t noticed. Perhaps motherhood has changed the way I use my voice.
Perhaps advocating for my two little people, making decisions when I’m exhausted, navigating uncertainty and learning that I cannot possibly keep everyone happy has changed something in me.
Perhaps I’ve become more comfortable saying what I think. More willing to have an opinion. More prepared to say no. More aware that my time matters. Maybe confidence doesn’t always arrive as a feeling.
Sometimes it shows up in the things you start doing without realising you’ve changed.
There is grief in becoming someone new
We don’t talk enough about this part. When we celebrate motherhood, we understandably talk about what arrives: the baby, the love, the family, the new experiences.
We don’t always talk about what has to be renegotiated. Your friendships may change. Your relationship may change. Your relationship with work may change. Your relationship with your body may change. Even your relationship with time changes.
And underneath all of that is a quieter question: What happens to me?
A 2026 study exploring maternal identity found that mothers could experience both upheaval and grief as they negotiated their previous identities with emerging versions of themselves.
That grief doesn’t make you ungrateful. It makes you human.
There can be sadness for the life that existed before children without wishing that your children didn’t exist. There can be nostalgia without regret. There can be a longing for freedom without wanting to be free from your children.
Perhaps we’ve made motherhood unnecessarily difficult by assuming that if you are happy with your new life, you shouldn’t miss your old one.
You don’t have to “get yourself back”
There is a whole industry built around the idea of getting your old self back.
Get your body back. Get your confidence back.
Get your sleep back. Get your life back. But what if “back” isn’t the destination?
What if the woman you’re becoming deserves just as much attention as the woman you were? This doesn’t mean abandoning the parts of yourself that existed before motherhood.
Quite the opposite.
Maybe you still want the career. Maybe you still want to dance, write, stay active, see your friends or go to a café for the perfect coffee or hot chocolate.
Maybe becoming a mum has actually made those things feel more important. The question isn’t whether you can return to who you were. It’s whether you can bring the parts of her that still matter with you.
And perhaps you can also acknowledge the parts that have emerged since. The woman who speaks up in a meeting. The woman who knows her limits. The woman who is less interested in being liked by everyone. The woman who has discovered that she is capable of far more than she once thought.
Motherhood can make you ask better questions
Before children, perhaps the question was:
What do I want? After children, it can become: What actually matters to me? Those aren’t necessarily the same question.
Motherhood can strip away some assumptions. It can expose which relationships nourish you and which ones don’t. It can make you reconsider how you spend your time. It can change what ambition means. It can make you more aware of inequality, care, money, work and the invisible labour that keeps families running.
It can make you fiercely protective of your time. It can make you softer. It can make you braver. It can make you realise that the person you were trying so hard to become before motherhood wasn’t necessarily the person you wanted to be forever.
None of this happens neatly. Matrescence isn’t a makeover. It’s not a five-step journey towards your “new normal”. It’s an ongoing negotiation between who you were, who you are and who you are becoming.
So, who is she now?
Perhaps that’s the question we should be asking mothers. Not: “Are you back to your old self yet?”
But: “What is changing?” What have you discovered about yourself? What have you gained? What are you ready to leave behind?
And what parts of yourself have you only just met? Because the woman you were before children isn’t necessarily gone. She may be there in your ambition. In your humour. In the music you still love. In the things you refuse to give up.
And perhaps she’s changed, too. Perhaps she has become more complicated. More tired. More compassionate. More certain about some things and much less certain about others.
Perhaps motherhood hasn’t erased her. Perhaps it has given her another dimension. And maybe the goal was never to get her back. Maybe the goal is to get to know her again.
Not the woman you were before children.
The woman you are becoming now.
