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Chapter II · Losing Yourself
identity loss
noun phrase
The grief a woman carries for the person she was before she became a mother - her certainties, her work, her ordinary Tuesday. It is a feature of the transition rather than a fault in the woman, and it is not the same thing as postpartum depression.
You did not lose yourself. You became someone else, and nobody told you that the becoming would feel like a loss. This is the chapter I started with, because it is the one I went looking for and could not find. It is also the chapter that is most often mistaken for something clinical - so where the two could be confused, I say so, and I point to a doctor.
In this chapter
Going back to work while you are still becoming someone
Going back to work after a baby is written about as logistics. The part nobody covers is returning to an unchanged role as a changed person.
Lost but well: not depressed, and still unable to find yourself
There is a state between coping and being unwell, and it does not have a name. Postpartum identity loss names what went missing, not the position you are standing in.
The friendships that do not survive matrescence
You used to speak every week, and now it is twice a year, and nothing happened in between. The friendships that quietly end in matrescence, and what ends them.
Identity loss after having a baby - is this a crisis or a crossing?
Crisis and crossing describe exactly the same facts.
When "I used to be someone else" is all you can think
The thought arrives while your hands are busy. Rinsing a bottle, folding a sleepsuit, waiting for the kettle. I used to be someone else.
The self you grieve when you become a mother
Postpartum identity loss behaves like grief because it is grief.
You didn't lose yourself - you became someone else
Postpartum identity loss is the experience of no longer recognizing the person you have been living inside for thirty-odd years.
Postpartum identity loss: is this normal, or is something wrong?
Yes, it is normal.
If the writing keeps running past the end
It is also in The Complete Passage, with the other three and The Threshold.