Rebekah Shackney, LCSW

Is new motherhood not the magical experience you expected?

Are you overwhelmed by the emotional roller coaster, the changes in your body and the exhaustion that doesn’t end?

Do you sometimes feel like you’re losing control? You are not alone. I’ve been there and I want to help.

I hear it all the time. I love my children, but I spend so much of my time focused on them that I don’t know who I am anymore. So many moms who leave the workforcewhen they have children may also feel like they lose themselves in the process.

I absolutely support a woman’s right to choose full-time motherhood, full-time career or any combination of the two after the baby comes. Clinical studies show that it makes little difference in the development and well being of the child, but it can make a tremendous difference to the mother.

Pre-child days are often spent in school, at work or otherwise engaged in activities that make women feel masterful. Then the baby comes along, and at least for a time those pursuits are abandoned to focus almost exclusively on caring for the child.We enter this new phase as beginners unsure about our abilities.

The first months pass by in a fog of diapers, feedings and chronic sleep depravation. We start to get the hang of it, but it still commands the majority of our time. When we do have a moment to ourselves we shower, sleep or do something really outrageous like the laundry or the dishes.

A few years pass in a flash. The baby becomes a more independent toddler. Now we have a bit more time to ourselves, but many of us have lost sight of that pre-baby person. Our interests, our work, our free-time all seem like indulgences that we had to devalue in our minds just to survive these last few years.

For many women being a new mom is not the purely joyous time they imagined, but few admit it. This silence leads to feelings of inadequacy and guilt. You and your baby deserve better.

We find ourselves wondering who we are, what is important to us…and still with every impulse to do something for ourselves comes a huge amount of guilt because shouldn’t we be focusing on our baby?

People say we can’t take care of our children if we don’t take care of ourselves. But if that is true why do we feel so guilty about it? How can we sort out all of this confusion and contradiction?