How Do You Grieve Your Former Self When You Become A Parent? A Psychotherapist Explains

What I didn't expect when becoming a mother three times over is how much grief I would feel as I attempted to reconcile who I used to be with who I was becoming. I also had no idea what to do with this grief. In the pressure that parents feel to be happy, grateful, and full of appreciation for their children, we lose the opportunity to mourn what we needed to give up in order to embody the role of caregiver. 

In dominant white American culture, we typically associate grief with literal death, but there is also something called "disenfranchised grief," which has no funeral. It's grief that comes from publicly minimized or unacknowledged loss—when we don't feel comfortable enough to show our emotions to the outside world and sometimes even to ourselves.

Because we are often unaware of how to acknowledge complex emotions associated with major life transitions, we are often left feeling unsupported when trying to reconcile the fact that we may feel sad, angry, resentful, or lost about having the children we know we wanted. 

So, we go all in on the new role—and cut ourselves off from who we used to be. Spoiler alert: This doesn't work. But don't worry, not all is lost.

Much like author Rachel Cusk writes in her memoir A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother, many parents name how they do not feel like themselves when they are with their kids and they do not feel like themselves when they are without them. I can relate: I both want to be with my children and to be without them consistently. 

I remember learning about the Lebanese artist Huguette Caland, who left her husband and her three children in Beirut in order to prioritize her creative wellness and freedom. I thought, how courageous and how cowardly. Being in this duality can send us into a world of self-judgment and self-doubt. So many parents are left constantly questioning themselves, asking, Am I normal?

I recall pushing my then 2½-year-old daughter on the swing, and another parent pushing alongside me asked, "Can you even imagine a time when you didn't have this little one, when you weren't a mother?"

She was implying that she couldn't, which struck me because I have a mental file full of memory cards when "mother" wasn't an identity I bore the responsibility of, and it's a cherished Rolodex. 

I can see these moments in Technicolor, but there are times when I do not know where they belong: Do I hang them up like the section of my closet filled with clothes that no longer fit but may someday? Or do I give them away, letting them remain a part of my past but not my present or future? 

As a psychotherapist and group facilitator for nearly a decade, I sit with people struggling through transitions—starting a new job, getting married, having a child, breaking up, or moving to a new city. 

When we are in a change process, we typically focus on what is demanded of us now instead of paying attention to what we are leaving behind in order to embody this new role or way of being. But it's actually orienting ourselves to the many small endings in our lives that allow us to live better with them.

You do not have to sacrifice who you were for who you are with your child. Here, how to embrace the change: 

Grief is an emotional and normal experience that follows loss. There is a lot that is gained by becoming a parent, but by nature, change necessitates loss—trade-offs between what we get and what we give up. Many of us believe that we should "move on" from loss instead of honoring it.

In a capitalist culture that places value on what we do and the speed at which we do it, we do not have space to slow down and feel. We are told to invest in progress, and in the forward motion of child-rearing, it's easy to disconnect from what we are leaving behind. 

What would it be like for you to revisit your past selves? To not only hang pictures of your children on the fridge but of the parts of you that you miss the most, bringing them into your present day? Images that reveal the hopeful look in your eyes during your early 20s? Or of you wearing your favorite dress out dancing? The first apartment you lived in on your own? The best wave you ever surfed? 

You do not have to remain the same as you were; life has changed you, but staying connected to the parts of you that mattered before your role as parent allows you to fuel all the sensations of aliveness within you.

Once we begin to orient to the endings associated with becomings, this allows us to get clear on what we are actually grieving in the first place and apply suture. 

Is it freedom, quiet time, the way you moved, your non-vanilla sex life that you are longing for? From here, you can decide if you want to integrate this emotion or experience back into your life in any way (read on to learn how) or acknowledge that, for now, it will stay in the past.

Parents, in particular, are sent mixed messages—on one hand, we are told that we are to "snap back" to the bodies and people we used to be, and on the other hand, we are expected to abandon those selves and fully embrace the demanding needs of our children. What remains conveniently unnamed by this black-and-white divide is the messy reality of any transformative process. 

Every transition, even the best ones, bring up anxiety, grief, and fear; we are leaving something familiar to us and straddling the line across to the unknown. What would it be like if we expected that finding the answer to the question "Who am I now?" would be preceded by a bumpy road filled with trial and error? 

The struggle itself—to find the sweet spot between ourselves and our children—is what helps us grow into the people and parents we are meant to be. Take the butterfly, for example, she must wrestle to get out of the chrysalis. If a human interferes to "help" the butterfly escape faster or more easily, she doesn't build the necessary muscles in her wings to survive. This shortens the butterfly's life span and inhibits her development. 

Know that this negotiation between identifying what's right for you and what's right for your children is a normal part of the developmental journey as a parent and an essential part of the hard work of loving yourself and another at the same time. 

Maybe your grief exploration will lead you to the fact that you've given up more than you can spare. There is a misconception that self-sacrifice is what's necessary in order to be an attuned parent—that putting the self aside will lead to better child-rearing. 

Psychologist Harriet Lerner, Ph.D., calls this concept "de-selfing," when one person does more giving in and going along than is her share and therefore loses contact with her own preferences and ability to make self-attuned choices. 

While putting your needs aside at times is essential, when we take ourselves (our feelings, beliefs, ideas) out of the relationship, we pose a threat to connection rather than feed it. Abandoning the core parts of the self, disconnecting from the things that make you you, impedes your connection to your child rather than enhances it. 

In support circles, I've heard parents make statements like "I love my children, but…" or "Being a parent is the best, but…" I pay close attention to what comes after the "but," as this seems to be where the difficult truth exists, if we didn't feel the need to pad it with the good feelings to protect ourselves from feeling guilt or shame. 

Listen to what comes after your "but" to find the parts of you that you are longing to reconnect with. "But it's so hard," "but it's so lonely," "but it's so boring" are all acknowledgments of your unmet needs that require further investigation.

Getting these needs met by (being more social with your friends, traveling to a new place, trying new sex acts) might enable you to be emotionally alive as a parent. I remember the time that my husband and I brought the double stroller with our two sleeping children to a beach party in Costa Rica for New Year's Eve. We parked them under the mangroves and danced close by. It wasn't the same as it had been, but it made us feel whole—a merging of our past and present selves. What does merging look like for you?

Part of the process of moving through grief is creating rituals that honor what is lost and make space for what is to come. It can be helpful to ask yourself: 

The grieving process has freed me up to be a mom that shares my spirit of adventure, reliance on community, and love of Stevie Nicks with my children. Sometimes we play "Wheels on the Bus" in the car, and sometimes I tell them about what it felt like to wear a gold lame halter dress and sing loudly until I lost my voice. They've come to even request "Edge of Seventeen" once in a while.