How I Rediscovered ‘Me’ After Becoming a New Mother
A trip to Amsterdam helped me re-enter society as a whole and complete woman again
Stepping out alone into the brisk autumn air in the city of Amsterdam in late 2019 was a victory. And no small feat. I’d left my seven-month-old baby with my husband and my mother back home in Austin, Texas, for this much-needed trip to help save my sense of self after battling postpartum depression for months.
I’ve written before about the struggles I faced after the birth of my son. Struggles that are not at all uncommon for women after giving birth. I had my son in March of 2019 and by fall my prolonged “baby blues” were under control with the help of a fantastic support system and a wonderful drug called Zoloft.
I was loving this new role—mama—but I still wasn’t quite back to my old self. Sure, I’d settled back into work and felt like I (finally) had this new mother thing well in hand, but something was amiss in the puzzle that is “Emily.”
I think a majority of new mothers will understand this missing piece. The independence. The selfishness. The vanity. Poof … suddenly another human being enters your life and their survival depends entirely on you, but you—the woman, the person, the individual—become entirely irrelevant in many other ways.
