The first time I read the line I love my baby and I miss who I was on a Reddit thread, I stayed on that thread for an hour. There were two thousand replies. Every one of them said some version of the same thing.

If you've found this page, I suspect you've been on a similar thread. Or you've typed identity crisis after baby or losing yourself in motherhood or I don't recognise myself anymore into Google in the dark and clicked through to anything that looked like it understood. I want to be the page that does.

This is for the women who used to know what they wanted, what they were good at, what they thought about while they did the dishes — and who can no longer remember any of those things. Or worse, can remember them and have nothing to say about them.

Nobody told me I'd grieve the person I used to be.

That sentence, almost verbatim, is the most common thing I hear in my consulting room from new mothers. It usually arrives somewhere in the second or third session, said quietly, half-apologetically, with eye contact that looks somewhere else.

It is not ingratitude. It is not regret. It is not, despite what the old-school depression questionnaires suggest, a sign that something is fundamentally wrong with you. It is grief — for a self you can't fully access anymore, in a culture that has decided that grief is unspeakable when there's also a healthy baby.

What's happening

Here's the bit I'd like you to know, and the bit that almost nobody told me.

Becoming a mother is a developmental transition. There's a word for it — matrescence — and it has been studied as a psychological process for decades, even though we never quite teach it the way we teach adolescence. The point of the word is this: motherhood reorganises you, the way puberty reorganised you. Identity, hormones, brain, body, social role, time, memory, sleep, sex, friendship, ambition. All of it gets restructured.

When you go through that kind of restructuring slowly, with elders who've been through it, with a community that recognises what's happening, with rituals that mark the change — you come out the other side knowing who you are now. The old self is honoured and the new self is welcomed.

When you go through that kind of restructuring in a vacuum — alone in an apartment with a baby, far from family, with the only feedback loop being whether the baby gained weight this week and whether your boss is going to take it well that you're missing another meeting — you don't come out the other side knowing who you are. You come out the other side feeling like you've gone missing.

That's the cost of doing matrescence in isolation. It is real. It is widespread. It is not a flaw in you.

What this looked like for me

I'll tell a small version of this — feel free to edit.

I left Italy in my twenties. When I left, I knew exactly who I was: a young woman from a small town in Salento, with a particular accent, particular foods I missed, particular streets I could close my eyes and walk down. I rebuilt that identity in Australia, painfully, over years. New language. New climate. New idea of what home meant. By the time I had a baby, I had a settled second self — Australian-Italian, comfortable in both worlds, knowing what I wanted.

Then I had a baby, and the second self went missing, too.

I didn't expect the second loss. The first one — leaving the country I grew up in — at least had a structure to it. There were grief stages. There were friends who'd done it. There were songs and films about migration. The second loss had no such scaffolding. Becoming a mother didn't even feel like loss to anyone outside my own body, because from the outside it looked like a glowing arrival.

I had to rebuild myself a third time. I am still, in some ways, doing it.

I tell you this not because my story is yours. Yours will have its own shape. I tell you because the cultural script that says motherhood completes you is, at minimum, incomplete. Sometimes motherhood completes you. Sometimes it dismantles you and asks you to rebuild from a different set of pieces. Often it does both at once.

What the women on Reddit are saying

Some real sentences (paraphrased) from the threads I've been on at 2am:

I had no family in Australia, and postpartum felt so lonely it was almost physical.

I went back to work after twelve months and I didn't even know what to wear. I had been three sizes for a year. I felt like an intern in my own job.

My friends without kids stopped inviting me. My friends with kids only wanted to talk about kids. I am so bored, and I feel so guilty for being bored.

I cry in the car between daycare and the office some mornings. Then I wipe my face and walk in like a normal person.

I keep wondering who I would have been if I'd stayed unmarried. I love my husband. I just keep wondering.

I look at my child and I am full of love. I look at myself and I cannot find anything I recognise.

You're not the only one. Across Australia tonight, thousands of you are saying versions of these things to nobody. The threads only count the ones who type it out.

The thing I want to say slowly

You don't go back to who you were before. I am sorry. I know that's not what you wanted to read.

The version of you that existed before this child is not coming back, exactly. She had a body that hadn't done what your body has done. She had a sleep architecture that hasn't existed in your house in two years. She had a sense of free time that the new you can barely conceptualise.

That doesn't mean she's gone forever. Bits of her — the funny one, the curious one, the one who made plans with friends, the one who finished books — those bits can come forward into the new you. They will, eventually. With sleep, with time, with somebody helping you carry the weight, they come forward.

But she does not come back as a whole person. She comes back as ingredients. The new you is made of her, and the baby, and the experience of becoming a mother, and a hundred small adjustments your body and brain made along the way.

The good news, if you can call it that, is that the new you is not a worse you. She's a more layered one. She has access to depths that the old you didn't. She knows things about love and exhaustion and grief and protectiveness that the old you would not have understood. Some of those are gifts.

The bad news is that you have to do the work of meeting her. And that work cannot be done by reading a Reddit thread at 2am.

What helps

A real list, briefly:

  • Naming it. Find the word matrescence and use it on yourself. Use it on your partner. Use it in your mothers' group if you can. The word changes what you can see.

  • Sitting with grief. Not pretending it isn't there. The version of you who wasn't a mother is worth grieving. You can grieve her and love your baby. They are not in contradiction.

  • Finding language for the new self. This is the slow work, and the most rewarding. Who is the woman you're becoming? What does she care about? What's she shedding from before? What's she keeping? You can think about this in pieces, on long walks, in journals, in therapy. You don't have to figure it all out by Friday.

  • Talking to somebody who knows this territory. A counsellor — me or somebody else. A friend a few years ahead of you who's already done some of this work. A therapist who specialises in maternal mental health. Your mum, if your mum is the kind of mum who can do this conversation.

  • Letting some plates drop. You cannot do all the things at the level you used to do them. The sooner you accept that, the sooner the new self has space to form.

The work isn't finding your old self. It's meeting your new one — slowly, while still feeding the baby.

A note before you go

If you'd like company for this work, counselling for mothers and matrescence are two of the threads I sit with most often. Sessions are online, fifty minutes, $150 GST-free. You can book a free fifteen-minute call any time, no commitment.

But honestly? Even if we never meet — please use the word matrescence. Please grieve who you were. Please give the new you a chance to come forward. Most of what makes this hard is doing it alone.

You're not alone. You're just up at 2am, and the rest of us are too.

— Elisa