Harnessing Your Authentic Self: Redefining Identity as A Mom
I always wanted to be defined by nothing. To be whomever I wanted to be, chose to be, who I simply was, at any given moment.
Then I arrived at a point in my life, a little older, dare I say a little wiser, when I stopped and asked…what defines me?
How can I define my identity in terms to share with others. Who am I?
I grasp for a word. Feeling the need to BE something, someone, beyond just who I am at this particular moment in time.
Always striving not to be defined on anyone else’s terms, why do we suddenly feel like less of the person we need to be when we realize we have mastered this and have no term to define us?
While I know that I need no label to weigh my own self worth, for some reason I suddenly feel almost like a shadow of the person I should be without a clear term to define who I am.
The only word that comes to mind at this point in my life is mother.
I fulfill one of the most challenging and rewarding roles there is in life.
Caring for another human being is responsibility at the highest level. In exchange, I get the privilege of knowing the greatest love and joy life can bring: the love of my child, the sound of his laughter, the feel of his arms around me, his hand in mine, his head resting on my shoulder.
As we come into our own as a mother, taking on this new role and feeling the drastic and all encompassing change this brings, for some reason we let part of ourself begin to silently slip away into the background until we no longer realize our own identity.
Suddenly I hear a voice screaming at me, “Be Your Own Person!”. A voice from within, “Be MY Own Person!”.
A resounding sound echoing throughout every fiber of my being, as if coming from my very soul, screaming at me to be stronger.
As if a thousand different voices are all coming together in one precise moment, the voices of all the people I have been in the past lives of my subconscious, yelling at me to be the woman I need to be because right now I am the weakest of all who have come before.
Stop waiting for something.
Seek out what allows a sense of the type of fulfillment that you alone need to feel complete. Whole. The YOU lying dormant within waiting for the right moment to step out into the light.
The moment is now. Be your own light.
That was written over a decade ago in the early years of motherhood. My first son was two and I was pregnant with my second. For me, it was a transition period, still adapting to life as a mom while at the same time trying to hold on to myself as my own person. It is a tough transition. In early motherhood we are trying to find our way. We are exhausted and depleted much of the time. Overwhelmed with a multitude of emotions.
As much as I loved my son with all that I had, I found myself in this strange space of feeling as if I was losing myself. This was me journaling my thoughts and expressing the need to step outside of this space and identify who I was, not only as a mother, but as an individual.
For many of us, it is a challenging balance to find. What we come to realize as we travel this journey of motherhood is that this will remain a challenge throughout the years. It is not isolated to our time as a new mom. This is part of our journey and is constantly shifting and changing as we learn and grow ourselves.
My boys are eleven and fourteen now. I have so much more time to myself than I did back in those early years of complete dependency on me, yet I still seek this balance. Every moment of every day, we are a mother. Whether our kids are present with us or not that never changes.
We must also find our own identity beyond being mom. I struggled with this for a long time. As a young adult, I was very focused on identity, what made me who I was, my studies, my passions, the little details that created not only the picture of me to others, but who I believed myself to be. When I became a mom and put my whole self into that role I strayed away from that person I thought I was.
It hit me one day that I could no longer think of any other term for myself than mother. If someone were to ask me who I was, what I was about, what I did, what I cared about…every answer I could come up with came back to being a mom. While I truly loved my role as a mother, this realization somewhat terrified me.
The above is me in that moment.
We must always be our authentic self. This is the person that we have been developing, building, becoming our entire life up until this moment. Our role as a mother gives a depth and richness to this identity. It contributes a layer to us that is both beautiful and so very complicated. We can bask in the light of this role, for it is such an important one. The role alone needs not define who we are as an individual in and of itself. We need to understand that our identity is constantly evolving as we add layers throughout our journey.
We must continue to nourish and grow all of the seeds of self. This is so important for our own mental health and also vital for our relationships with our partners, friends, family and in our work. Equally true for both fathers and mothers, we must each continue to grow as individuals, for our own success, self confidence and feelings of self worth.
It is often easy to allow the role of parent to consume our energy as we foster the growth and development of our children while ignoring our own growth. We need to fully realize that we can, and have every right, to continue to grow our own identity while also being the best parent we can be. Raising strong, healthy, well balanced kids is better accomplished by confident, healthy, balanced parents.
It is up to each of us to determine how to redefine our identity as a mom. We must reflect on the person we were before our children. We need to examine the person we were striving to become. Did we hit a pause button on our personal growth? That is understandable as we took on this new challenging role that consumed us. We need to understand that it is ok.
Time did not stop. If you are anything like me, it seems like while we hit pause on our own life, the hand of time hit the fast forward button on everything around us. As we watch our children grow time moves in fast forward right before our eyes.
It is not too late to slow it down and place ourselves there in the action rather than watching it play out in front of us, through this lens of motherhood. We need to let our own light shine. Find the space and time for ourselves, to focus on who we are, where we are headed next on our journey and be our own light in this world.
The moment is now.
