International Women’s Day: A Letter to the Mom Who Lost Herself (And Is Finding Her Way Back)

Dear mama who forgot who she was,

I see you.

I see you in the carpool line, staring through the windshield with that faraway look — the one that isn’t boredom, isn’t tiredness, isn’t distraction. It’s something deeper. Something you don’t have a name for yet. Something that settles in your chest at 2 PM on a Tuesday and whispers: Who am I outside of this?

I see you in the grocery store, standing in the cereal aisle, staring at forty-seven boxes of the same thing, and realizing you don’t even know what kind you like anymore. You know what your kids eat. You know what your partner prefers. But you — the actual, individual human being pushing this cart — what do you want?

You can’t remember.

I see you on the couch at 10 PM, after the lunches are packed and the counters are wiped and the laundry is moved to the dryer and the emails are answered and the forms are signed and the baby is sleeping and the house is quiet. And in that quiet, instead of peace, there’s a strange ache. A hollowness that doesn’t make sense, because your life is so full. So impossibly, relentlessly full.

How can you feel so empty when there’s no room left for anything?

I see you. And I wrote this letter for you.

Because today is International Women’s Day. And everywhere you look, there are posts celebrating women who are breaking barriers, shattering ceilings, launching companies, running countries, changing the world. And you are genuinely inspired by them. You are proud of them. You believe in the power and brilliance and unstoppable force of women.

But there’s a quiet voice underneath the celebration that asks: What about me? Where did I go?

This letter is for that voice. The one you’ve been hushing. The one that doesn’t get a hashtag or a celebration or a keynote speech. The one that belongs to the woman who existed before the word “Mom” became her entire identity.

She’s still in there. I promise you. She didn’t leave.

She’s just been buried under the most all-consuming, identity-reshaping experience a human being can have. And today — this day that belongs to all women — is as good a day as any to start digging her out.

The Woman Before

Do you remember her?

The woman you were before you had children. Not the idealized version, not the Instagram-filtered memory — the real one. The messy, complicated, fully alive one.

Maybe she stayed out too late and laughed too loud. Maybe she read novels in a single sitting and took long baths without anyone banging on the door. Maybe she painted. Traveled. Argued passionately about things that had nothing to do with sleep schedules or screen time limits. Maybe she ran marathons. Maybe she binge-watched terrible TV without guilt. Maybe she went to concerts, danced badly, got lost in cities she’d never been to before.

Maybe she had ambitions. A career she was building. A craft she was mastering. An education she was pursuing. A dream she was chasing — not because it was practical, not because it served anyone else, but because it lit something up inside her that she couldn’t explain and didn’t need to.

She had opinions that weren’t about parenting. She had conversations that didn’t revolve around pediatrician appointments and developmental milestones and the best way to get a toddler to eat vegetables. She had a sense of humor that was just hers — not the exhausted-mom humor of “wine o’clock” and “mommy needs a break,” but something sharper, weirder, more specific.

She had a body she inhabited differently. Not better, necessarily — but differently. A body that was hers alone. That existed for her own pleasure and purpose, not as a vessel, a food source, a climbing structure, a comfort object.

She had time. Not more hours in the day, but a different relationship with time. Time that stretched. Time that was hers to waste, to spend, to fill however she wanted. Time that wasn’t sliced into nap windows and school pickups and the relentless metronome of someone else’s needs.

Do you remember her?

Maybe you do. Maybe the memory is crisp and close, and it hurts to touch it. Or maybe she’s faded — like a photograph left in the sun too long. You know she was there. You can almost see the outline. But the details have gone soft.

Either way, I want you to know: she was real. She mattered. And she didn’t die when you became a mother.

She just got very, very quiet.

The Slow Dissolution

Here’s the thing nobody warns you about: you don’t lose yourself all at once. There’s no single moment where the woman you were gets packed into a box and shelved. It happens gradually. Imperceptibly. In increments so small you don’t notice them until, one day, you look up and realize you can’t find her anymore.

It starts with the practical things. The hobbies that get quietly set aside because there’s no time, no energy, no mental space. The guitar that gets moved to the closet. The running shoes that get pushed to the back of the rack. The art supplies that get relocated to make room for the changing table. I’ll get back to it when things settle down, you tell yourself. Things don’t settle down.

Then it’s the social life. The friendships that drift — not dramatically, not with conflict, but with the slow erosion of canceled plans and unreturned texts and the growing gulf between your daily realities. Your single friends are traveling, exploring, building. Your child-free friends are available on Tuesday nights and spontaneous weekends. And you are unavailable in a way that feels permanent, even though you know it isn’t. The invitations slow. The group chats move on without you. You tell yourself it’s temporary. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t.

Then it’s the ambitions. The career that gets put on pause, or downsized, or rearranged into something that fits around school hours. The dream that gets filed under “someday.” The application you don’t submit. The opportunity you don’t pursue. Not because you don’t want it, but because wanting it feels selfish when there are lunches to pack and fevers to manage and a tiny human who needs you more than any job ever could.

Then it’s the preferences. The small, specific tastes and desires that make you you. You stop ordering what you want at restaurants because it’s easier to eat what the kids are having. You stop choosing movies because it doesn’t matter — you’ll fall asleep twenty minutes in anyway. You stop buying clothes you love because “it’ll just get spit-up on it.” Your aesthetic, your taste, your style — they get flattened into the beige functionality of a life designed entirely around small children.

And then one day, someone asks you: What do you do for fun? And you open your mouth. And nothing comes out.

That’s the moment. The moment you realize the dissolution is complete. Not because you chose it. Not because you wanted it. But because motherhood is an identity so enormous, so consuming, so loud — that everything else got drowned out.

And the worst part? Nobody around you noticed it happening either. Because to the outside world, you didn’t disappear. You transformed. You became “mom” — and everyone treated that as a promotion, not a loss. Congratulations, they said. Congratulations on becoming everything to someone else, while quietly becoming nothing to yourself.

The Grief Nobody Talks About

I want to name something that I think you’ve been feeling but maybe haven’t had permission to say out loud:

You are grieving.

You are grieving the woman you were before. And that grief is real and valid and profound, and it does not mean you don’t love your children. It does not mean you regret becoming a mother. It does not mean you want to go back.

It means you’re a human being who has experienced a fundamental identity shift, and you haven’t been allowed to mourn what was lost in the process.

We have rituals for every other kind of loss. We grieve the dead with funerals. We grieve relationships with breakup songs and ice cream. We grieve jobs with severance packages and LinkedIn updates. But we have no ritual for the loss of self that motherhood demands. There’s no ceremony for the woman who used to be. No acknowledgment. No space for the ache of it.

Instead, we get platitudes. You’re not losing yourself, you’re finding a new purpose. Being a mom is the most important job in the world. You’ll get your life back when they’re older.

And all of those things might be true. But they don’t touch the grief. They paper over it. They make you feel like you’re wrong for feeling it. Like there’s something ungrateful about standing in the middle of the life you chose and feeling a deep, bone-level sadness for the life you set down.

You’re not ungrateful. You’re grieving. And those are not the same thing.

The psychologist Alexandra Sacks has a name for this. She calls it “matrescence” — the developmental process of becoming a mother. Like adolescence, it involves a fundamental reorganization of identity. Hormones shift. Brain structure changes. Social roles transform. Relationships rearrange. The self as you knew it is disassembled and rebuilt.

And like adolescence, it’s disorienting. Emotional. Sometimes painful. Often lonely. Not because something has gone wrong — but because something enormous is happening, and our culture has given us almost no framework for understanding it.

You are not broken. You are becoming. But becoming is allowed to hurt.

International Women’s Day and the Reckoning

So here we are. International Women’s Day. A day designed to celebrate the strength, the achievements, the resilience, the sheer force of women.

And you’re scrolling through tributes and thinking two things simultaneously:

These women are incredible.

And: I can barely remember what I was passionate about before I started packing snack bags.

This isn’t self-pity. It’s a reckoning. It’s the collision between the celebration of women’s power and the quiet awareness that you’ve been directing all of yours outward — toward your children, your partner, your household, your family — with nothing left for the woman at the center of it all.

International Women’s Day asks us to celebrate what women can do. But this year, I want to ask you a different question: What have you been doing to yourself?

Not the dramatic, obvious things. Not abuse or neglect. The quiet things. The barely-perceptible choices that, stacked on top of each other, day after day, year after year, amount to a slow, systematic abandonment of self.

Eating last. Sleeping least. Putting every need behind every other need. Running on empty and calling it strength. Shrinking your desires until they fit inside the margins of everyone else’s life.

We celebrate women’s strength. But we rarely ask: at what cost?

The cost is you, mama. The cost has always been you.

The Myth of “Having It All”

Let’s talk about the lie we were told.

The promise that women can “have it all” — the career, the family, the partnership, the social life, the fitness routine, the mental health, the personal growth, the hobbies, the clean house, the well-adjusted children, the date nights, the friendships — is one of the most damaging myths ever sold to women. Not because the desire for a full life is wrong. But because the promise was made without changing any of the structures that make it impossible.

You were told you could have it all, but nobody restructured the workday to account for school pickup. Nobody shared the mental load equally. Nobody built a culture where fathers are expected to sacrifice their identities and careers and sleep and bodies the way mothers are. Nobody created a society where raising children is a communal responsibility rather than a private, individual burden.

“Having it all” was never a gift. It was a trick. It took the feminist dream of women’s liberation and twisted it into women’s obligation — to do everything men do AND everything women have always done, simultaneously, without complaint, while looking effortless.

And when you can’t pull it off — when something gives, when something breaks, when YOU break — the message is clear: you weren’t strong enough. You didn’t try hard enough. You didn’t want it badly enough.

That message is a lie.

You are not failing because you can’t have it all. You are living inside a system that was never designed for you to succeed. The exhaustion you feel is not a personal failing. It is the predictable, inevitable result of an impossible equation that no amount of meal planning, time blocking, or productivity hacking can solve.

And the first step toward finding yourself again is releasing the guilt of not being everything to everyone. You were never supposed to do this alone.

The Quiet Rebellion of Finding Yourself Again

Here’s what I’ve learned, and what I want you to hear with every fiber of your being:

Finding yourself again is not selfish. It is survival. And beyond survival, it is the most radical, necessary, important thing you can do — not just for yourself, but for the tiny humans who are watching your every move and learning from you what it means to be a woman in this world.

When you abandon yourself completely for your children, you teach them that a woman’s worth is measured by her sacrifice. That her needs don’t matter. That love means erasure. That motherhood means disappearance.

But when you fight for yourself — when you carve out space for your own identity, your own passions, your own pleasure — you teach them that a woman is a whole person. That she can love fiercely and still belong to herself. That caring for others and caring for yourself are not opposing forces but complementary ones.

Finding yourself again is not a betrayal of your family. It is a gift to them. Because the mother who knows who she is, who has something that’s just hers, who is fed by something beyond the demands of motherhood — that mother has more to give, not less. She is more patient, more present, more joyful. She is modeling a life worth living.

And that might be the most important thing your children ever learn from you.

Permission Slips for the Mom Who Needs Them

I know you know all of this, intellectually. I know you’ve read the articles. I know you understand, in theory, that self-care isn’t selfish and that you can’t pour from an empty cup.

But knowing isn’t the same as believing. And believing isn’t the same as acting.

So here are your permission slips. Not because you need anyone’s permission — you don’t — but because sometimes, hearing someone else say it out loud is what finally makes it real.

Permission to Want Things for Yourself

You are allowed to want things that have nothing to do with your children. A career that excites you. A creative practice that fulfills you. A body that feels strong. A friendship that nourishes you. A room of your own. An hour of your own. A life that includes, but is not limited to, motherhood.

Wanting things for yourself does not take anything away from your children. It adds to the fullness of the woman they get to call Mom.

Permission to Miss Who You Were

You are allowed to miss your old life. The freedom. The spontaneity. The uninterrupted thoughts. The identity that didn’t revolve around someone else’s nap schedule. Missing the person you were does not mean you wish your children didn’t exist. It means you are a complex human being who can hold two truths at once: I love this life and I miss the one before it.

Both can be true. Both are true. And neither one cancels the other out.

Permission to Change Your Mind About What Motherhood Looks Like

You are allowed to redefine motherhood on your own terms. If the version you’re living doesn’t fit — if it’s too restrictive, too sacrificial, too performative, too much — you are allowed to change it. You don’t have to parent the way your mother did. You don’t have to parent the way Instagram says you should. You don’t have to be the room mom and the PTA volunteer and the homemade-costume-making, organic-snack-packing, never-raising-her-voice paragon of modern motherhood.

You are allowed to be a good mother who also prioritizes herself. These are not contradictions.

Permission to Ask for Help

You are allowed to need help. Not because you’re weak or incapable, but because raising children was never meant to be a solo endeavor. In every culture, throughout all of human history, children were raised by villages — by grandmothers and aunties and neighbors and community. The nuclear family model, where one or two exhausted adults shoulder the entire burden of childcare, is a historical anomaly. It is not natural. It is not sustainable. And it is not your fault that it’s crushing you.

Ask for help. Accept help. Pay for help if you can. Demand help if you must. You are not supposed to be able to do this alone, and the fact that you’ve been doing it anyway is not a testament to the system working — it’s a testament to your impossible strength.

Permission to Take Up Space

You are allowed to be loud. To have opinions. To disagree. To be inconvenient. To have needs that complicate other people’s plans. To say no. To say I need. To say I want. To say not right now and this matters to me and I am more than this role.

Motherhood has a way of making women small. Of teaching us to fold ourselves into the margins, to take up as little space as possible, to make ourselves easy. Accommodating. Low-maintenance. Invisible.

You were not put on this earth to be invisible. You were put here to be fully, unapologetically, inconveniently, beautifully human. And that means taking up space — not just for your children, but for yourself.

The Strength That Nobody Sees

Before we go further, I want to stop and acknowledge something.

The strength that mothers carry is staggering. And most of it is completely invisible.

It’s the 3 AM feeding where you’re so tired you can barely keep your eyes open, but you hold that baby against your chest and you stay. It’s the moment when your child says something that breaks your heart wide open, and you hold it together because they need you to. It’s the forty-seven decisions you make before 9 AM — what to wear, what to pack, what to sign, what to remember, what to anticipate — that nobody will ever see or thank you for.

It’s the emotional labor of tracking everyone’s feelings. Knowing that your oldest is worried about a friendship at school. Knowing that your youngest is afraid of the dark this week. Knowing that your partner had a bad day and needs extra grace tonight. Carrying all of this simultaneously, in the background, like an operating system that never gets to shut down.

It’s the managing of your own emotions so that everyone else can have theirs. Swallowing the frustration so you can be patient. Pushing past the exhaustion so you can be present. Hiding the anxiety so you can be reassuring. Performing steadiness when everything inside you is shaking.

This is not weakness. This is not “just being a mom.” This is a feat of endurance that would bring most humans to their knees. And the fact that you do it every single day, with minimal recognition and even less support, is not something to take for granted. It is something to stand in awe of.

So before you find your way back to yourself — before you reclaim the hobbies and the ambitions and the identity — I want you to look at what you’ve already done. What you’re doing right now.

You are extraordinary. Not in spite of being “just a mom.” Because of everything that “just a mom” actually means.

Small Acts of Selfhood: How to Start Coming Back

Finding yourself again doesn’t require a dramatic reinvention. You don’t need to quit your job, go back to school, leave your family, or have an eat-pray-love epiphany on a mountaintop.

You find yourself in small acts. Tiny, deliberate choices that say: I am here. I exist. I matter.

Order the meal you actually want. Not the chicken nuggets off the kids’ menu. Not the thing that’s easiest to share. The thing that sounds good to you. Sit with the pleasure of choosing something for yourself.

Listen to your music in the car. Not the Frozen soundtrack. Not the kids’ podcast. Your music. The songs that remind you of who you were. The ones that make you feel something that has nothing to do with motherhood. Let your children hear what their mother loves.

Wear something that makes you feel like yourself. Not the “mom uniform” of leggings and a messy bun (unless that IS what makes you feel like yourself — then wear it with pride). The earrings you stopped wearing because the baby grabbed them. The lipstick you stopped applying because “what’s the point.” The jacket that makes you stand a little taller. Wear it. The point is you.

Do one thing that scared the old you. Sign up for a class. Submit the application. Send the email. Start the project. Not because you have time — you don’t. But because waiting until you have time means waiting until your children are grown, and by then, you’ll have spent twenty years practicing being someone who doesn’t pursue things.

Say your own name. This sounds strange, but stay with me. How often does someone call you by your actual name? Not “Mom.” Not “Mama.” Not “babe” or “honey.” Your name. The one your parents gave you. The one that existed before any of your other identities. Say it. Write it down. Let it feel like it belongs to you again.

Have a conversation about something that has nothing to do with children. Call a friend. Talk about a book, a movie, a political issue, a weird thought you had, a memory from college, a dream you can’t shake. Let yourself be a person with a mind that extends beyond the borders of your household. You used to have so many thoughts. They’re still in there.

Create something. Write a paragraph. Sketch a picture. Plant a garden. Cook a meal that’s more than sustenance — that’s art. Build something with your hands. The act of creation is one of the most powerful ways to reconnect with selfhood, because it requires you to make choices that are entirely, unequivocally yours. Nobody else can create the thing that lives in your head. That’s yours alone.

These are small things. But they are not small things. They are acts of reclamation. Each one is a stitch in the fabric of an identity that’s been unraveling. Each one says: I remember. I’m still here. I’m coming back.

A Note About the Women Who Came Before Us

On this International Women’s Day, I’m thinking about the women who came before us. The ones who fought for the rights we take for granted. The ones who marched, organized, demanded, and refused to be silent so that we could vote, own property, work, divorce, choose.

Those women were mothers too. Many of them. And they fought not just for abstract principles of equality, but for the right to be full human beings while also being mothers. They fought for the radical idea that a woman could have children AND a self. That the two were not mutually exclusive.

We stand on their shoulders. And the best way to honor them — today and every day — is to claim the fullness they fought for. Not to shrink. Not to disappear. Not to sacrifice ourselves on the altar of motherhood and call it love.

They didn’t fight for our right to lose ourselves. They fought for our right to keep ourselves, even in the midst of giving everything to the ones we love.

So when you feel guilty for wanting more — for wanting something that’s just yours — remember: wanting more is not a betrayal of motherhood. It is the fulfillment of a promise that generations of women fought and bled for. You owe it to them. You owe it to your daughters and sons. And most of all, you owe it to yourself.

To the Mom Who Thinks It’s Too Late

I know there’s a voice in your head right now saying: It’s been too long. I’ve been “just a mom” for so many years that I don’t even know who I am anymore. The window has closed. The moment has passed. It’s too late for me.

It is not too late.

It is never too late to remember who you are. It is never too late to want things. It is never too late to start.

You are not a house that has been demolished. You are a house where the lights have been turned off for a while. The structure is still there. The foundation is solid. The rooms are intact. You just need to start flipping switches.

And it doesn’t matter if you start at 28 or 35 or 42 or 56. It doesn’t matter if your kids are babies or teenagers or grown. It doesn’t matter if you’ve spent two years or twenty in the dissolution. The path back to yourself doesn’t have an expiration date.

Because here’s the secret that nobody tells you about finding yourself again: you don’t go back to who you were. You can’t. That woman existed in a different time, with different experiences, in a different body. She’s not waiting for you at the end of some nostalgia tunnel.

What happens is better. You meet someone new. A woman who has been through the fire of motherhood — the love and the loss and the grief and the joy and the breaking and the rebuilding — and emerged with a depth, a wisdom, a tenderness, and a fierceness that the woman before could never have had.

She’s not the old you. She’s not just the “mom” you. She is every version of you — the dreamer, the mother, the woman, the human being — integrated into something whole.

She’s who you’re becoming. And she’s extraordinary.

You Are Still in There

So here’s my letter to you, on this International Women’s Day.

You are not lost. You are not gone. You are not too far in to find your way back.

You are a woman who has done the hardest thing a human being can do. You have loved someone so much that you forgot yourself in the process. And the forgetting wasn’t weakness — it was the only way you knew how to survive the enormity of what was being asked of you.

But survival mode was never meant to be permanent. And you — the whole, complicated, brilliant, messy, passionate, specific, irreplaceable you — deserve to be found again.

Not for your children, though they will benefit. Not for your partner, though they will notice the light coming back on. Not for the world, though it needs what only you can give.

For you. Because you are worth finding. Because you were always worth keeping. Because the woman who got quiet when the demands got loud deserves to speak again.

She has so much to say.

This International Women’s Day, I’m not asking you to celebrate with a hashtag or an inspirational quote. I’m asking you to do one thing — just one — that belongs to the woman underneath the mom.

Say your name. Wear the earrings. Play the song. Call the friend. Start the thing. Write the sentence. Take the walk. Make the choice.

And know this: you are not alone in this.

Every mother you see in that carpool line, in that grocery aisle, on that playground — she is fighting the same quiet battle. She is standing in the same ache. She is looking for herself too.

We are all looking. And we are all, slowly, bravely, imperfectly, finding our way back.

You are still in there, mama. She didn’t leave. She was just waiting for you to come looking.

Happy International Women’s Day to the woman you were, the mother you are, and the person you’re becoming.

All three of her are magnificent.

With love, from one mom who is still finding her way back, too.

Reflection Questions

Take a few minutes with these. Write your answers down if you can. There’s something powerful about seeing your own truth on paper.

Who were you before you became “Mom”?

Think about the woman you were before children. Not just what you did, but who you were. What made you laugh? What made you angry? What did you dream about? What were you proud of? Write her a letter. Tell her what happened. Tell her you remember.

What have you quietly set aside that you miss the most?

Not what you think you should miss. What you actually miss. The hobby, the friendship, the ambition, the way of spending time that made you feel most like yourself. Name it specifically. Give it weight. It matters because it mattered to you.

What would you do with one hour that was entirely, non-negotiably yours?

Not an hour to be productive. Not an hour to rest so you can be a better parent. An hour with no purpose other than your own pleasure or interest. What would you do? Your answer tells you something important about what you’re hungry for.

What is one small act of selfhood you can do this week?

Not a grand gesture. Not a life overhaul. One small, specific thing that says: I am here. I exist beyond this role. Choose it now. Put it on the calendar. Protect it.

What do you want your children to learn about what it means to be a woman?

This is the big one. Because they are learning — not from what you tell them, but from what you show them. What are you modeling right now? And what do you want to model instead?

If the woman you’re becoming could speak to the woman you are right now, what would she say?

Close your eyes. Imagine yourself five years from now — a version of you who has done the work of reclamation. Who has found her way back to herself. Who is whole. What does she want you to know? What does she want you to start?

Listen to her. She’s already in there, waiting.

A Final Word

The world needs women who are whole.

Not women who have sacrificed everything on the altar of motherhood and called it virtue. Not women who have erased themselves and called it love. Not women who are running on empty and calling it strength.

The world needs women who are fed. Who are full. Who are burning with something that belongs to them alone. Who can look their children in the eye and say: I love you with everything I have, and I also have a life that is mine.

That is not selfishness. That is the most powerful form of love there is — love that overflows from a full cup, rather than dripping from a dry one.

So this International Women’s Day, I celebrate you. Not the highlight reel you. Not the performing-motherhood you. Not the “I’m fine” you.

The real you. The tired you. The grieving you. The searching you. The one who read this letter with tears running down her face because finally — finally — someone said the thing she’s been feeling but couldn’t find the words for.

You are enough. You have always been enough. And the woman you lost? She didn’t leave. She’s been here all along — in the way you sing in the car when nobody’s listening, in the opinion you almost shared but held back, in the dream you think about at 2 AM, in the spark that flickers when something reminds you of who you used to be.

That spark is not a memory. It’s a pilot light.

And it’s still burning.