Irish Country Magazine columnist Laurie Morrissey shares her thoughts on losing her identity through motherhood
Inside every issue of Irish Country Magazine, Laurie Morrissey pens a column on the topic of parenting. From disastrous family holidays to the unique loss of identity through motherhood, Laurie shares the reality of parenting – the good, the bad and the ugly.
While you gain an awful lot in experiencing parenthood, there are a few things you lose. (For those of you who immediately went to pelvic floor, I hear you loud and clear. I’m doing Kegels as I type!). Your social life, for one, necessarily gets put on the shelf for a while, along with some ambitions, a sprinkling of friendships and probably any extensive travel plans. But it’s the loss of identity, experienced by so many, which can prove most confusing and confronting.
It happens immediately. I can remember in those weird, blissful, emotional hours after my son was born a nurse asking, “Would Mum like something to eat?”. I glanced towards the door to see if my own mother had entered the room. Did the CUMH cater to all family matriarchs after a birth? Or was I now this Mum character? Perhaps my own mother had felt the same when she was first referred to as Nana.
With the birth of a new baby there is a massive role shift. Parents, and particularly mothers, become a distilled, simplified person who exists in many ways only in relation to this tiny new person they hardly even know. I had held the belief my baby would kind of slot into my life, like a cute accessory, an addition to our family rather than I becoming an extension of them. In becoming Mum, could I still be the person I aways was?
It becomes difficult to see where they end and you begin. Until I made a recent conscious (and ironic!) decision to become more decisive I had hardly noticed I had become a person who didn’t know what they even liked any more. Our meals are always planned around what the children will eat rather than what I might fancy, while weekends and holidays revolve around their being entertained.
In a supermarket I’ll be picking up their choice of biscuits (chocolate chip) and favourite fruits (easy-peel oranges, bananas for the small one) and my cafe choices are often made around the calibre of hot chocolate on offer, access to toilet facilities and sturdiness of cafe furnishings. At this stage the coffee is beside the point; I just pray I’ll get to drink it hot.
As a stay-at-home parent it’s a theme I find myself revisiting time and time again. Paid employment lends us a status; it’s a shorthand to communicate our personality type and screams, “I have a life too”. But as a stay-at-home parent I had to stand in the discomfort of being ‘Just Mum’. Which is not to belittle the role I was play, I thoroughly understand it’s worth, but to emphasise the feelings I had of being laid quite bare.
In terms of my identity, I felt vulnerable. I wanted my new role and yet felt a sense of grief about what I was leaving behind as well as a sense of trepidation about who I might possibly emerge as at the other end.
It is easy to understand why so many struggle when their offspring finally fly the nest. When we re-emerge on the other side of parenthood, the side where our children no longer rely on us for absolutely everything and medical professionals begin to call us by our first names again, who are we?
It struck me a long time ago that the biggest favour parents can do themselves is to keep in touch with their true selves as much as possible. Is there a concert you would really like to go to or a group you’ve been itching to join or some self-development you’ve been mulling over recently? Easier thought than done, I know. But if we don’t nourish who we are at our core, in some way, it becomes very easy to lose sight of ourselves.
The other day I bumped into a friend. A mother of four, she was in a rush; but not to tend to one of her children or enroute to yet another activity. She was on her way to a precious weekly piano lesson. With her youngest having started playschool she had seen a gap in her child-saturated schedule, and she was grabbing it with both hands.
The author Martha Beck writes about living in integrity and I find her message useful in terms of accessing that true self, the person beyond the persona of parent. For one year she undertook to tell no lies, not even a white one. (Can you imagine? Yikes!)
What she learned was profound. When we are living in integrity and checking in with what we truly want and need, it keeps us on track in terms of who we are and who we aspire to being. Hopefully, when your beautiful baby grows and leaves home, the person you’re left with is a person you recognise and whose company you really enjoy.
What I’ve come to see is that while parenthood scuppers and smothers your identity to an insane extent, it also offers an opportunity to rebuild and remould your identity. An ‘out with the old, in with the new’, if you will. While important to us, our identities are never perfect and the life-bomb which parenthood brings is nothing if not a nudge to focus on the stuff which lights up your true, deep-down self.
We all deserve to feel happy and fulfilled. And our children need to see us so.
Read Laure’s column inside every edition of Irish Country Magazine. Find your nearest retailer here.
