Before I had my babies, I expected sleepless nights. I expected to be spat up on. I expected my day to look very different.
I didn’t expect to wake up one day and not recognise myself.
To not feel at home in my body. To feel a complete loss of freedom.
I missed the version of me that knew she was good at something. Because I certainly didn’t know whether I was a good mum or not.
That version of me felt very far away.
Who I Was Before Babies
Capable. Knew what I was doing. Knew I was great at my job. Loved makeup, loved a good outfit. I knew where I was going and I knew I was getting there.
After babies? I had no idea what I was doing.
Two big pieces of my identity crumbled under the weight of having twins.
The first was my independence. My previous life coaching brand was literally called ‘An Independent Maven’. I’m quite happy in my own company, doing my own thing. I really struggled at high school because I didn’t “get” the unspoken rules you needed to follow to fit in. I’ve valued being able to do whatever I wanted, when I wanted. THAT obviously doesn’t mesh well with being a Mum to twins.
The second was viewing myself as capable. I was someone at work that solved things. When projects went off the rails, I got them back on track (one project I worked on had a cargo train company as the client so the train puns are deeply embedded now). I knew I was good at my job and valuable to my company.
And I did NOT understand why people say being a Mum is the more rewarding thing they’ve ever done. For the first eight months, I didn’t find it rewarding AT ALL.
Having twins as a first time Mum meant the intensity of the transition from not a mum to a mum was dialled ALL the way up. My life, and as a consequence my identity, was completely transformed.
But what I’ve learned is the identity loss isn’t about how many babies you have. It’s about what motherhood does to who you thought you were.
Why becoming a mum feels like losing yourself
Someone else’s needs suddenly take ALL of your time, attention, love, energy.
As first time Mums, desperate to the be the best possible Mums to our babies, we want to pour our all into them.
Combined with a seriously depleted tank and there’s very little, if not nothing left for you.
Your routine is different. Your clothes don’t fit. You’re not working out or cooking or doing hobbies in the same you did before.
Those newborn months have the ability to fully consume you.
It’s less that it feels like you’ve lost yourself and more like you actually have lost yourself.
(Don’t panic, I’m going to help you find your way back to yourself and better than ever. I know because I’ve done it!).
Why the identity loss hits harder if you had a career you were proud of
A huge source of your fulfilment is just gone. You’re no longer (as least for now) needed in the way you’re used to.
And you’re needed in a new way that you have no idea whether you’re doing a good job or not.
At work, you would finish a client presentation and know you’d nailed it.
With your baby, you finish a breastfeed and have no idea if they got enough or not.
At work, a conversation with a colleague is tense and you have the skills to navigate it
With your newborn, you find yourself yelling at it that it’s ruined your life out of sheer frustration then burst into tears feeling like the worst Mummy in the world.
Over the course of your career, you’ve built skills, gained experience. When you find yourself in a situation that is outside of your comfort zone, it is still familiar enough that you can figure out how to break down the new task, or who to talk to for guidance or even what to ask Google!
Having a baby is SO far outside of your realm of experience that you have no point of reference to even get you started.
When you’ve spent the majority of your life doing well at school and going to university then working hard in your career, who you are has grown alongside those experiences.
It’s impossible to detangle.
Then you have a baby and it’s not there any more.
The pride. The satisfaction. The capability. Being the trusted colleague.
That’s what makes your new identity as a Mum so hard to reconcile with who you used to be.
READ MORE: New Twin Mum Self-Care Postpartum Tips: Wisdom From Our Midwife
What actually helps you find a new identity as a Mum (and keep the best bits of who you were)
Look at your babies for evidence you’re doing a good job.
The shift that helped me the most wasn’t finding better external validation, it was realising my babies were already giving me all the feedback I needed. If they were happy, settled, sleeping and eating well, their needs were met. I was doing a good job.
I learnt to read their cues. To understand what different cries meant. I realised over time that if I paid enough attention, my beautiful girls could tell me what I needed to know. That gave me the confidence to stop agonising over the recommended sleep schedule every day. Instead if the naps were working for my babies, me and my fiancé then we stuck with it. Expert advice be dammed.
A moment really stuck with me as a turning point. We’d had a rough morning, and I got the naps and feeds back on track. Settled babies = happy Mum. I remember being so chuffed with myself. A bad morning no longer meant a bad day. I had the skills and the knowledge of my twins to turn it around. Nobody told me I’d done well. I just knew.
Having twins might mean twice the feedback for me to listen to but the principle still applies regardless of how many kids you have or how old. In their own way, they are communicating with us all of the time. It’s our job as parents to listen.
Weaving the old identity into the new Mum identity.
I remember the specific moment I gave up on the tracking app. No more obsessive inputting of feeds and pumping and naps. It was driving me crazy trying to do everything “right”. Letting go of the tracking was liberating. I stopped outsourcing my power to what an algorithm said.
I did the same with social media. Every new piece of parenting advice I encountered created pressure. Whether I felt like I needed to implement it immediately, to file it away for later, or just felt guilty I wasn’t already doing it, 99% of what appeared in my feed made me feel worse. So I stopped engaging. My algorithm shifted, and I stopped feeling like a terrible Mum every time I scrolled (which let’s face it was an embarrassing amount of time in those early months).
I also learned to celebrate tiny pockets of freedom when they appeared. The first walk I did solo with the twins. Getting the confidence to go to a mum meetup. I stopped lamenting the freedom I no longer had and started noticing the freedom I did.
Independence for me used to look like doing what I wanted when I wanted. Independence for me as a Mum is thinking for myself and trusting my own judgement about what is right for my family. Turns out who I was hadn’t disappeared when I became a Mum, I had to weave my new Mum identity into who I already was.
READ MORE: My babies are one! Reflections from my year as a first time mum to twins
Embracing how you parent is unique to you.
When the twins started solids, we pretty quickly evolved from purees into a version of baby-led weaning that worked for us. You wouldn’t find it in any textbook. It was ours.
I’ve learnt as a parent to gain enough information to make decisions I feel good about and then drop research mode for experiment mode. It’s more important to me to use a little trial and error to find what works for my family than fixate on trying to implement the “right” approach. Don’t even get me started on how my confusing and contradictory information is out there.
I also had to actively fight comparison, especially comparing myself to first-time mums with single babies. So often I felt like I should be doing more activities, more classes. I had to remind myself over and over again that my capacity was different. Swimming lessons solo with twins simply weren’t possible, and there was nothing wrong with that. Also I wasn’t a packed schedule kind of person before I had kids so why would I be one now?
I had to ask myself “what kind of Mum do I want to be? How do I want motherhood to go?”
Dragging myself out of the house to activities everyday sounded like torture. I preferred lots of flexibility in my schedule before babies and I prefer lots now. Again I was weaving who I was before kids into who I am now I’m a Mum.
How to stop losing your identity after having a baby
There are two tangible actions I want to leave you with to find your identity after having a baby:
- List out everything you like about who you were before you became a Mum. What are you missing about yourself? Ask yourself how that person approaches parenthood because she’s still in you begging to be invited to the party.
- Rebuilding self-trust is built on evidence. Noticing when you make a good call. When your baby is happy. When you do something you haven’t managed before. Those small wins show you that you’re a good Mum, that being a good Mum is part of your new identity. Open up your Notes app RIGHT NOW and start a list of things you’ve done well as a Mum.
My experience tells me that finding your identity after having a baby really benefits from some intention.
With your baby taking everything you’ve got, it’s easy to assume you just need to hang in there long enough and eventually you’ll feel like yourself again.
But the truth is, you are different now. And the magic lies in weaving the best of who you were with the best of who you’re becoming.