In Favor of Getting Lost

After I had my first baby, my feet swelled up to double their size. As I cradled my precious newborn, I looked down at my toes and they truly looked like they belonged on a different body, not the one I’d been occupying for the past 32 years. It was a bizarre feeling, dysphoric, to see a part of me so dramatically unrecognizable. I took pictures of them, trying to confirm that they objectively looked how I was seeing them through my subjective eyes. Sweat poured out of them in my sleep as they released excess fluid and hormones. My toes went from engorged, to swollen, to just slightly inflamed, and then over two weeks time they shrunk back to their usual shape and size…kind of. My feet grew a half-inch with each pregnancy, so they weren’t exactly the same.

But really, nothing was.

I’ve written about the feeling of being too changed by motherhood before, the fear and shame that I’d lost myself, which our culture had warned me against. I’d internalized the trope – “don’t lose yourself in motherhood.”

After my first baby I worked diligently to preserve my pre-baby life and sense of self, something I see now as a protective mechanism amidst the disorienting AND beautiful changes that come with motherhood.

I got back to work very quickly. I tried and failed to squeeze back in my jeans. I tried to control my baby’s sleep in the early weeks of her life to resurrect a routine that didn’t translate to this new chapter. I’d gone from days dilligently structured around goals, priorities, and to do lists to a blur of naps and feedings and barely distinguishable days and nights.

I was trying NOT to lose myself by clinging to the familiar. What I wish I’d done is honor the chaos of becoming someone new.

Despite all my efforts, I couldn’t reach back in time and pull the old me into my new life. I was different, I was a mess, in process, transforming so quickly I couldn’t update the “sense of self” software fast enough to compute this new me.

I was lost…in motherhood?

And maybe that’s how it’s meant to be. Maybe the crazy pace of change that feels too topsy turvy to integrate is part of the initiation into a new you: a mom!

And maybe had I accepted that, even anticipated it, I could have gone looking for a changed version of me with more curiosity, compassion, and surrender instead of desperately trying to resurrect the pre-mom me.

Maybe getting lost isn’t such a bad thing.

We are suppose to be altered by life. We are suppose to get lost and found and lost and found on an endless loop forever amen.

We hear, “don’t lose yourself in motherhood”

We hear “you’ll feel like yourself again?”

But I think these tropes are asking us not to be transformed by the most innately transformative part of womanhood and I think they might even be making us feel shame when we are. The self isn’t static and yet all these phrasings suggest it is. The “me” is something immutable that lives in us, something we must shield from inevitable forces of change, especially when the change is messy — two steps forward, one step back.

I think when we don’t feel like ourselves, we are being ushered into an upgraded version of us — the next iteration. We resist, maybe we even flee, running toward the “me” of the past. But what if we choose differently? What is we choose to progress instead of regress even when it’s brutally uncomfortable.

I think when we reject the idea of an immutable self we allow for more expansive ways of being and can more gracefully navigate the massive transition from maiden to mother.

There’s more to this, of course. Motherhood is a topic rich with historical, cultural, social, and political context. There’s an undervaluing of motherhood underpinning these tropes, too. There’s something specifically distasteful about losing yourself IN MOTHERHOOD (gasp!) that’s different than losing yourself in work, or in your craft, or even in a relationship, and I think that speaks mostly to our cultural view of care work and women.

But, I’m interested in flipping this phrase on its head. How can we reframe getting lost as an opportunity for finding a more expansive identity and a fuller life?

I used to be a shoe size seven and a half. Now I’m a size nine — a larger shoe to fill.

Read more of Stephanie’s work and connect with her on Substack at stephaniemendeloff.substack.com. She is also on Instagram @stephaniefromcrea.