I'm only a mother now and no longer myself. How do I find my way back?

This feeling doesn’t come from having too little time for yourself. It comes from being addressed, for months, in only one role, a role that is always about someone else. You are not disappearing because you give too much. You are disappearing because nobody asks about you any more.

Why the usual advice misses the point

Take time for yourself. Go back to the gym. Treat yourself.

These sentences are not wrong, they just miss the core. An hour alone does not turn you back into the person you were if you spend that hour planning next week.

What is missing is not time. It is three other things.

Someone speaking to you as a person. Not as Mum, not as the one who knows where the hats are. For weeks, most of a new mother’s conversations revolve around the baby, including the ones with friends, including the ones with her own mother.

Doing something you are good at. Parenting rarely gives you the feeling of being good at something. There is no feedback, no result, no end of the working day. For many women this is exactly the biggest loss, and it is hardly ever talked about.

Making decisions that only concern you. Small ones too. Which film, what to eat, when you sleep. When every decision depends on someone else, you lose your sense of your own.

What really helps

1. One thing a week that isn’t about you as a mother.

Not two hours of pampering. One thing. A conversation about something else. A text you read. Something to do with your work, if you have any.

The only rule is: it must not be something that is useful to anyone else.

2. Tell your people what you need.

Most people around you ask about the baby because they think it makes you happy. They don’t notice that you have been telling the same story for months.

“Next time, please ask me first how I am. Not us. Me.”

That is uncomfortable to say and changes more than any free afternoon.

3. Let your partner get to know you again.

The most common mistake in this phase is that couples only talk about organisation. And then they wonder why they feel like strangers.

The twenty minutes without anything organisational are there for exactly this. A question that works:

“What has been on your mind this week that had nothing to do with us?”

4. Take back one decision.

A single small one that belongs only to you and is not up for negotiation. That sounds like very little. For many women it is the first moment in a long time when they decide something again that doesn’t serve someone else.

Why this is not ingratitude

Almost every woman who tells me about this says in the same breath: “I love my child, I don’t mean it like that.”

You don’t have to add that. Not with me and not with anyone else.

Two things can be true at the same time. You can love your child more than anything and still miss who you were before. The one says nothing about the other.

The feeling that really wears you out is often not the loss itself. It is that you are not allowed to say it out loud.

When it is more than that

If for weeks you no longer feel any joy, not even in quiet moments. If you feel cut off from yourself or from your child. If you are functioning but no longer feel anything.

Then this is no longer a question of identity that a free hour can solve. Talk to your midwife, your gynaecologist or your GP. That is a normal step, and there is good help for it.

What I want you to take with you

You will not go back to being the woman you were before the children. That is the uncomfortable truth, and I see no point in keeping quiet about it.

What there is, is something else: a version of you that knows both. That knows what she can bear and therefore decides differently than before.

The way there doesn’t start with a free weekend. It starts with someone asking you once a week how you are. If need be, you yourself.