A guided journal
Field Notes
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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
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.