New Mothers Should Stop Trying to Bounce Back into Who They Were Before Childbirth.
And frankly, we should all forget about the older version of ourselves we keep trying to go back to.
Do you often think back about a moment in your past and wonders what happened to that cool/fun/smart person? Do you ever try to go back to that person and seek those feelings again?
I am sorry to break it to you but that person is gone, stop trying.
When I went through postpartum depression, journaling and meditating really helped me let go of a lot of scary thoughts. One difficult thought that kept coming back was mainly around “when am I going to “snap back” and feel like myself again?” I would weight myself everyday to see how quickly I lost all the water from my pregnancy and look at myself in the mirror to make sure I didn’t get any extra stretch mark. I was waiting for my old body to be back.
Internally, I couldn’t help but to feel like a different person. I have always been very driven by my professional and business ambitions and for some reason I didn’t care anymore and was ready to drop everything to become a stay-at-home mother.
And you know what made it worst? It was obvious that my husband, the father of my daughter didn’t go through any changes. Or let me say this right, he didn’t go through “the same” changes I did. It made me furious and quite frankly, envious. He is a bodybuilder with lots of ambitions and strong mindset, and apparently having a baby didn’t slow him down or stop him. Or at least it wasn’t obvious. I was pretty much facing my worst thoughts every time I would see him.
I had to meditate on this topic a lot to get over it and these are the conclusions that helped me move on and turn my negative thoughts into positive ones.
- Rather than suppressing the new individual that you are today, get to know her/him. Respect that person’s battles and embrace their learnings.
If you are a mother reading this. There’s no such thing as “bouncing back” or “snapping back” into your old body. This is some BS that’s been fed to new moms all over social media. You just carried a whole human being in your uterus for 9 months, give yourself some credit. You will never be the same person again. You can only be better, wiser, stronger and kinder.
- An adventure video game character needs to lose a life at some point to get closer to their goal. For the fun to continue, they win a NEW life to get another chance to overcome the level one more time.
For some reason, I’ve been repeating this analogy in my head to look back at all of the characters that I ever was before. They all had different experiences, circumstances and knowledge in their head. The one I am currently in is definitely a compounding of all the previous once: older, wiser and proud. No matter where you are in your life, you are still standing just by waking up every morning and trying again!
- Grieving is love with nowhere to go.
Clearly you should be proud of yourself for having so much love for somebody that you used to be. However, you might need to go through grieving and find a place within the new you where to pour all of that love.
Ultimately, I think it comes down to the level of expectations we set for ourselves.
I will leave you with this thought I heard from Morgan Housel, the author of The Psychology of Money in a podcast: people with lower expectations live happier.
