Motherhood, Identity and Career - Who am I Now?

I think one of the things that you've talked about is identity.

And I know that from even what you've said, when a woman becomes a mother, everything shifts.

The time, the energy, the priorities.

What is actually usually happening to her identity during that transition?

Wow, that's a good question.

So what's happening during that season is, you you notice that a mother is pouring she's giving herself especially during the initial stages after birth um so a mother is pouring emotional mental physical because the child is leaning more onto the mother because children from the age of 0 to 13 they really need the mother so much so what normally happens to the identity The woman that is not pouring back to herself after pouring to her child or her children, she ends up depleting whatever was there already before the children came on board.

So you find that she's depleting maybe everything now she's giving but never pouring back to herself.

So you find that her identity gets distorted because she starts questioning, and who am I? Okay, I'm giving all this.

So she enters into an element of survival, ticking the boxes, the routine work, the aspect of this needs to be done, children need to sleep at this time, water needs to be put.

So she's just on autopilot and not really connected to self or centered back to herself.

So what happens to a woman and her identity, it gets tested.

What gets tested is what was there before becoming a mom.

If you didn't form an element of understanding yourself, an element of knowing your hobbies, an element of knowing what makes your heart, what makes you rest, what makes your heart feel like regulated, your nervous system.

So the aspect of what gets tested is already what was there before becoming a mom.

And now what also gets tested is after becoming a mom, have you lost the sense of self? So have you pushed your identity to be connected to the role of a mother? So everything starts from being a mom and stops by being a mom.

And there's no aspect of disassociating the mom element and also the individual person.

For example, the individual person like Esther, because before the babies, there was Esther.

So if there was no nurturing of Esther before the babies, confusion kicks in.

Confusion kicks in and anger comes into the woman because she feels like she's being stripped of everything.

But in real essence, before even the babies came, nothing was standing in terms of her grounding, in terms of her centering or grounding as a person.

She didn't have an identity that she can be able to even say, okay, I sleep well.

But you know, motherhood also challenges what was there.

But there are aspects of you that even if you become a mom, there are aspects of you that you fostered as a single person or before becoming a mom, as an individual, they are going to help you to center yourself.

Probably if you used to journal, probably if it's support, you had surrounded yourself with support.

If you found an element of regulating your emotions or not avoiding your emotions, sitting with your emotions.