A world upside down

What happens to a woman when she becomes a mother? This is the question I have been asking myself for more than a decade. When motherhood turned my world upside down and then seemed to continue to disrupt everything, I thought I knew about myself. As each new year and new baby emerged, I became a detective searching for evidence that what I’d experienced was “something”. Surely I wasn’t alone in what I was feeling, and questioning? Surely I wasn’t the only one feeling this radical shift in who I thought I was?

But I couldn’t find anything.

Why didn’t we talk about what happens to a woman when she becomes a mother? Why didn’t we acknowledge the massive redefining of her identity, her dreams and goals, her relationships? Why do we continue to dismiss the transformation a woman experiences in every area of her life as she navigates early motherhood with a smile and a “this too shall pass”?

After years of asking these questions of myself, thousands of mothers and experts around the world, I finally stumbled across the answer: a word that had been first spoken more than 40 years earlier, but