The self you grieve when you become a mother

Postpartum identity loss behaves like grief because it is grief. The flatness, the short fuse, the crying at something that does not warrant crying, the resentment of people who have done nothing wrong. What makes it disorienting is that the person you are grieving is you, and she is not dead.

She is not anywhere. There is no body, no service, no week off work, no casserole on the step. Nobody says sorry for your loss, because from the outside nothing was lost. Something was added.

So the grief runs underground, and grief that runs underground takes longer and costs more.

A grief that has no standing

There is a term for this in the grief literature: disenfranchised grief. It describes a loss that is not socially recognized, where the mourner has no acknowledged right to mourn, so the usual supports never switch on.

Kenneth Doka named it in a book in 1989, and the examples usually given are the death of an ex-partner, a miscarriage, the loss of a pet, a friend nobody knew you were that close to. The loss is real and the permission is missing.

I am not a clinician and I am borrowing the term rather than applying it to you. But it was the first thing I read that explained the specific texture of this, which is not sadness so much as sadness plus the sense that you are not allowed to be having it.

That second part does most of the damage. A grief you are permitted to feel gets metabolised in company. A grief you have to hide gets carried alone and gets carried longer, and you spend energy on concealment that you needed for the actual feeling.

What is actually gone

The general version of this is useless. "You miss your freedom" is close enough to be dismissed and vague enough to be argued with, and both of those keep you from looking at the real inventory.

The first thing is the quality of your attention. Not your time, which is what everybody says. Attention. There used to be a way of thinking where a thought could go all the way to the end without a supervisory process running underneath it, listening for a sound in another room. That undivided quality is what has gone, and it does not come back at bedtime, because by then the listening has become the shape of your mind.

The second is spontaneity, which is not the same as fun. Spontaneity is the ability to say yes to something before you have costed it. Every yes now runs through a logistics calculation involving another adult, a nap, a bag, a bottle, a bedtime and a debt you will owe someone. The thing you have lost is not the outing. It is the version of yourself who did not have to be a project manager to have an evening.

The third is a body that was not a resource. Yours is now infrastructure: it feeds, it settles, it is climbed on, it is required at three in the morning whether or not it is well. Being touched all day by someone you love does something strange to the appetite for being touched at all. This is a hard one to say out loud, because it sounds ungrateful and it is not ungrateful. It is just true.

The parts nobody warns you about

You have stopped being the main character of your own day. Every day now has a protagonist and it is not you. You are the weather, the setting, the supply chain. Some days that feels like love, and some days you catch yourself moving through your own life as a supporting role and cannot find where you went.

Your friendships have changed genre. What used to happen by accident now requires a calendar. You have friends you would take a bullet for who you have not had one uninterrupted conversation with in two years, and the friendship is fine, and it is also not the thing it was. It is being conducted through logistics rather than through presence.

And there is the version of you other people used to respond to. This one took me longest to see. I was somebody in a room before, in a way I never had to think about: a person with opinions about books, a person who was asked things. Now I am introduced as somebody's mother, and people speak to me about the children, and they are being kind. But the self that existed in other people's reactions has quietly stopped being reflected back, and it turns out I did not know how much of her lived out there rather than in me.

The congratulations problem

Everything on that list was traded for something enormous. That is precisely what makes it unmournable.

You cannot grieve the loss without appearing to regret the gain, and you do not regret the gain, so you say nothing. You are handed a card with a stork on it while you are quietly conducting a funeral, and the card is sincere, and the funeral is real, and there is no sentence you can say that holds both at once without somebody's face changing.

So you learn to say "tired". Tired is the socially permitted word for all of this. It is accepted without follow-up, it implies a solution that involves sleep, and it costs nothing to hear. It is also nowhere near the size of what you mean.

I said "tired" for about two years. This is personal observation rather than anything established, but I think the euphemism did me real harm, because a feeling you keep translating into a smaller word eventually gets filed as a smaller feeling, including by you.

No ritual, no date, no permission slip

Grief usually has architecture around it. A date it happened. A gathering. A set of things people say. A period afterwards where you are treated gently and expected to be strange.

This has none of that. There is no moment she went. There is a slow substitution over months where the woman who could sit in a cafe reading for three hours simply stops being available, and nobody, including you, marks the day.

I have wondered whether that is why the anniversaries land oddly. Birthdays, particularly. Everyone is celebrating a beginning, and somewhere underneath, on the same date, is the other thing, and you cannot raise a glass to it.

Where this stops being matrescence

Grief and depression overlap in appearance and they are not the same, and the difference is not something a website can settle for you.

Grief moves. It comes in weather. There are afternoons that are ordinary and even good, and then something opens it up again. Depression is flatter and more continuous, and it tends to take the good afternoons too.

If what you are carrying does not shift at all, if you cannot function, if you have stopped being able to feel anything about the baby in either direction, or if your own thoughts frighten you, that is a matter for a doctor, a midwife or a psychologist. Postpartum depression and postpartum anxiety are treatable illnesses and they respond to treatment. Nothing here is a substitute for that, and the ability to name your grief precisely is not a reason to sit alone with something that is not grief.

What I still do not know

Whether she is gone or only unreachable.

Four years in I genuinely cannot tell you whether that woman was destroyed or is simply on the other side of a period where nothing can be spontaneous, waiting for the children to need less. Both stories fit the evidence I have. Women further along tell me some of her comes back, and I notice I do not entirely believe them, and I also notice I want to.

What I am fairly sure of is that she would not come back unchanged, so the returning version is a third person, not the earlier one. Which means the grief stands regardless of how the question resolves.

I have not made peace with that. I am not going to pretend otherwise in order to end this well.

What to carry

The grief is not a sign that you have made a mistake, and it is not disloyalty, and it does not need to be resolved before you are allowed to feel it. It needs to be permitted, which is a much smaller thing and almost nobody offers it.

You are allowed to miss her. Not in a way that gets fixed, not as a stage on the way to acceptance, and not on the condition that you also list what you have gained. Just miss her, on a Tuesday, with the washing on.

Some losses are not problems to be solved. They are simply losses, and they deserve the honesty of being called that.

If you want the rest of what I write about this, I send it out as I go. No schedule, nothing to buy.