I Lost Myself When I Became a Mom—My Child-Free Friends Found Me

They still saw me as who I was before I became a mother.

Having lived in the ‘burbs for seven months, my two friends had come from Brooklyn for a night out I sorely needed. Whipsmart New Yorkers who I met over passed joints in dorm rooms half a lifetime ago, they walked into happy hour with the burdenless swagger of women without children. Smiling over my hastily ordered martini at dinner, I said, “The first part of the year has been challenging.”

I meant my dog was dying. The two surgeries we had tried in order to save him made life at home with a two-year-old messy, heartbreaking, and even harder. On top of cleaning blood and stool from his once perfect little booty—and from all the new rugs in my new house—I was watching him fade away.

I was fading away, too.

Since becoming a mother, my connection to my personal selfhood has been more tenuous than ever. Two thirds of mothers report a loss of identity after having a child, and I was one of them. Largely thanks to solo walks through my old Brooklyn neighborhood with my dog Oscar, I’d managed to regain a confidence in my skin within about six months of giving birth, having healed from C-Section surgery and settled hormonally after breastfeeding. In New York City  I could comfortably return to the life I had lived for 13 years—only now I had a baby.

But moving had reignited my identity crisis, my Brooklyn uniform and tattoos out of context in Westchester County. Here my daughter Jojo found her voice, and the word I heard bouncing from her mouth most often was “Mama.” When you asked her my name, my role is what she would reply—a privilege I don’t take for granted but that was eroding the “self” I had known all my life, nonetheless. It helped to take regular trips into the city to melt into the throngs of weirdos, mimic my old routines, and most of all, see my friends.

However, since Oscar had gotten sick we hadn’t gotten out much. Someone needed to be home with him at all times. So, it was a relief to have two friends I have known since college at my house. In front of our new woodburning stove on one of the last chilly nights of the year, we told all the secrets we had built up over the few weeks since we saw each other last. Mostly, we discussed whether anti-depressants or disassociation was better for dealing with the state of the world. And as I cursed and cackled unfiltered, I settled into something familiar—myself.

While one friend had to get back to the city, my friend Joselyn decided to stay the night. A bridesmaid at my wedding, she and I have run the gambit together over 18 years of friendship, arguing, making up, and becoming familiars on the lamp-lit side streets of Manhattan linked arm in arm. It is so easy to say the hardest things to her, and that night all the fear and exhaustion and anticipatory grief tumbled out, Negroni-scented, in a rush.

We had an extra nightcap while we each took turns scratching Oscar behind his silk-soft hound ears. He was calm when being loved, but that night in our bedroom his whines became desperate. The cancer had gotten to his lymph nodes despite removing his initial lump, and we had been warned it may grow to an intolerable state all of a sudden. When it became clear he wouldn’t make it through another night, my husband Henry and I wept over our first baby instead of sleeping.

At 7 a.m. my husband Henry knocked on our guestroom door and asked Joselyn if she could stay with our daughter while we took Oscar to the emergency pet hospital. We stalled on the way home after putting Oscar down. We knew our house and our daughter would soon consume us back into parenthood, leaving little room for what we were feeling. We pulled off toward the reservoir where we would walk Oscar almost every day. The coming spring hung in the air like a try-hard motivational poster on a cinder block wall—hope struggling to resonate against a backdrop of grief. 

When Henry lamented that Oscar would not get to see a spring in our new house, I realized I didn’t know how to approach a new season without him. I’d been hiding behind him since moving, choosing to spend time with him over getting out, my sense of self on too shaky of terms for introductions. I was “Mama” now, but I didn’t know how she dressed, or spoke, what she did, or did not, say.

When my Joselyn left, I felt like a piece of me would chip off with her. I sunk into her familiar, curl-cushioned shoulder for too long. I would not have survived the morning without her. Just as she had when I texted her, hormone-destroyed and scared, my second night as a mother—I can’t do this. I need you—she held my daughter in order to hold me, no questions asked. 

Still when, that night, my daughter sat up in her bed and vomited, I did what I always do: texted the usual family and other mom group chats. It’s no secret that mothers in America are in mental crisis. Issues like gender gap inequality, mom burnout, and postpartum identity grief speak to the erosion of “the village” as we once knew it. There aren’t generations living under one roof anymore. We don’t show up unannounced to our neighbor’s front door. Now our villages telecommute in, offering a distracting FaceTime, an article, some advice.

The usual responses came in. Sympathy for my daughter, guidance on how to get the stains out, questions about what she ate, reminders to push fluids.

Once your child is born, the relationships that were once yours often shift, in a subtle but important way, toward your child. Now, we all call my mom “Nonna,” my husband “Daddy,” my sister “Aunt Nikki.” Even mom friends, sisters-in-law, and cousins, become each other’s back-up care, emergency contacts, and honorary aunties. We immerse into the identity together, a support that is fundamental to motherhood. 

But this shift of energy, concern, and attention does little to restore the person.

The day after my dog’s death, I lay in bed with my daughter whose delicate curls still smelled faintly of vomit, and I forgot about the woman I was 24 hours ago—laughing and gossiping and psychoanalyzing the minutiae of our inner thoughts with my girlfriends, my dog at our feet—let alone who I was before becoming a mother.

I faded back into my mom role, forgetting myself again, slipping through the screen of grief into motherhood. I refrained from texting my friends who had just done so much buoying, feeling like too much of a burden, but Joselyn texted me anyway: “How’s our girl?” I sent a picture of my miserable two-year-old watching Cinderella with her giraffe Geoffrey tucked in beside her.

“No. I meant you!”

The village wants to hold the baby. Your girl wants to hold your hand.

She remembers me pre-motherhood, running across a highway to get to a rave, saving my cash tips for a new tattoo, dancing in the rain at a festival—reckless, scrappy, funny. Most importantly, she has no stake in my performance as a mother. She sees my child lovingly, but as an extension of me. No real responsibility for my child’s development rests on her shoulders, but my success does.

“That is a tough blow. Hope you weren’t wearing your new going out shoes,” she responded to the news of my daughter’s illness, referring to the time I threw up on her shoes as a partying youth.

Offering perspective, irreverence, and permission to be myself, while the rest of my village focuses on optimizing the problem, she witnesses the experience. 

When the next day my very hungry child seemed ready to stomach more than saltines, her barely digested eggs ended up in my lap. I knew my mom would know how to clean it, and my mom friends would know what to try instead of eggs, and my sisters would have suggestions about when to call a doctor.

That support helps me to be the safe and capable kind of mom I want to be. But I also want to be the kind that is resilient, resourceful, and sometimes messy. I want to be myself. Instead of springing into action or spiraling into anxiety, I gathered my daughter into my arms, her regurgitated eggs still warm between us.

“I’ve got you,” I said—not as a mommy who is deliberate, actionable, and organized, but as the woman who once upchucked on the Lower East Side outside of a slice shop while my girlfriend was holding my hair.

Political pressure dismisses women without children as forsaking their gender’s most important role. Meanwhile, mothers are desperate for support, crushed under the weight of having taken it on. When on separate late nights Joselyn and my other friends without children turn to the subject of whether or not they would like to eventually become moms themselves, I always struggle for a moment to remember they aren’t mothers already. They are more than a piece of the “village.” They are all pieces of me. Without them, I couldn’t be a mom. Or at least, not a happy one. I would fade away into existential oblivion, and so aren’t they already part mother, too? Our child-free friends provide scaffolding that makes the whole system work. Support—amidst toppling maternal mental health—that holds the person, not just the mother. 

This Mother’s Day, I’m celebrating the friends who remember who I was before I became a mom. They might be the only reason all of us mothers haven’t entirely lost it yet. 

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