I Love Being a Mom But Lost My Identity Outside Parenting: What Helped Me Reclaim Small Pieces
Last week, I sat in my 7-year-old’s pediatrician waiting room filling out a new patient update form on the office touchscreen. I got to the line that asked “Occupation,” and I froze. I stared at the blank white box for a full minute, thumb hovering over the keyboard. I’m a full-time mom now, so technically that’s the answer, but for a second I couldn’t even pull up the name of the marketing job I did for eight years before my kids were born. It sat on the tip of my tongue, fuzzy and out of reach, like a word you know but can’t quite remember in the moment. I wrote “homemaker” anyway, closed the form, and sat there twisting my wedding ring while the toddler in the next chair screamed about a stolen lollipop.
I left the office that day feeling guilty, because I love being a mom. I chose to step back from full-time work when my second kid was two, when daycare costs for two ate up almost my entire paycheck and my husband’s job came with solid health insurance. It was the right call for our family, and I don’t regret it. I like packing the weird dinosaur-shaped granola bars my oldest begs for. I like sitting in the rain at soccer practice, cheering even when she spends the whole time picking dandelions on the sidelines. I don’t even mind reading the same picture book four times in a row before bed. But that day at the doctor’s, it hit me: I don’t know who I am outside of all that. If you took away “mom,” what’s left? I couldn’t answer.
A month before that, I stayed after my oldest’s elementary school to help pack up leftover baked goods from the PTA fundraiser. I was folding empty cardboard boxes next to a mom I’d said hi to a handful of times, when she stopped mid-sentence about cookie dough orders and said, “I just realized yesterday I can’t name my favorite movie. I can only list my kids’ favorite movies.” I laughed, but it stuck with me, because I’d had the exact same thought three nights before, when my husband and I were scrolling Netflix trying to find something to watch after the kids went to bed. I kept suggesting animated movies we’d already seen a hundred times, and I couldn’t think of a single one I’d picked for myself before kids. That’s when I realized I wasn’t just tired from lack of sleep. I’d let my whole identity shrink down to the roles other people need me for.
I talked to a few other mom friends after that, and almost every single one said they’d felt the same way, even the ones who worked full-time outside the home. A lot of the advice I saw online was unhelpful: just go back to work, just take a weekend away for yourself, just do a big self-care reset. I can’t afford a weekend away, and I don’t want to go back to full-time work right now. So I started testing small, low-effort things that fit into my existing days, no big changes required.
First, I dug my old watercolor set out of the back of the closet where it had been sitting under a pile of outgrown winter coats and extra diapers. I used to paint all the time before kids, but I’d convinced myself I didn’t have time to do a full painting, so I just left it stored away. Instead of forcing myself to carve out three hours on the weekend, I set the watercolor set on the counter right next to my coffee maker. Every morning, after I drop the kids at school, before I start folding laundry or picking up toys or running errands, I paint one tiny thing. It’s usually just a leaf off the pothos by the window, or the chipped edge of my mug, or a dandelion I picked from the front yard. It takes 10 minutes, tops. I don’t have to finish anything or make it look good. It just has to be mine.
Next, I made a note in my phone labeled “Me” and I add one thing to it every time I notice something I like that isn’t related to my kids. The first thing I added was “black coffee, no sugar.” I’d started drinking my kids’ leftover hot cocoa with extra marshmallows so much I’d forgotten I preferred my coffee plain. Last week I added “the smell of old paperbacks” when I found my college poetry collection in the attic. This weekend I added “walking around the block alone without anyone asking me for anything.” It’s a tiny thing, but every time I add something, I’m reminding myself there are parts of me that exist outside of taking care of other people.
Another small change I made: when people ask what I do, I don’t just say “I’m a mom” anymore. I say “I’m a mom, and I paint little things in the morning.” It’s a 10-word change, but it shifts how I think about myself, and it shifts how other people see me too. Last month, my oldest came home from school and saw me painting a dandelion on the counter, and she said, “I didn’t know you painted, Mom.” That stung a little, but it also made sense: I’d never shown her that part of me before. Now she sometimes sits down and paints her own thing next to me, but my 10 minutes are still mine. I don’t have to turn it into a mom activity if I don’t want to.
After that pediatrician appointment, I went home and dug through a moving box in the attic to find my old employee ID from that marketing job. There it was, my name printed clear, the job title I couldn’t remember that morning staring back at me. I taped it to the inside of my kitchen cabinet, so I see it every morning when I pull out my coffee mug. I still have days where I freeze when someone asks me a question about myself that doesn’t involve my kids. I still spend 90% of my day talking about forgotten lunch boxes, homework, and lost socks. I don’t want to get the old me back, anyway. That person didn’t know how to fix a broken bike chain or calm down a kid having a meltdown over a wrong colored cup.
I’m just trying to add a little bit of me back to the life I have now. Some days it feels like enough, some days it doesn’t. But I know now I’m not the only one who feels this way. That’s the first thing worth remembering: you don’t have to feel guilty for missing yourself, even when you love the life you’ve built.
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