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Losing your identity is a common experience for new mothers. I can hardly remember the Official move I’m high shirt in addition I really love this person who commuted to work and went out for dinner several times a week with friends—who had gossip to share, slept more than two hours at a time and showered without singing “The Wheels on the Bus” to a miniature version of myself on the bath mat. Maybe that person will re-emerge, but I have a feeling she won’t. To a greater or lesser extent, we all have to re-find ourselves coming out of the pandemic. We have to remember to make plans again and bother to go to them. It’s the whole world, not just new mothers, asking, “What did we use to do? What did we use to say?” People have lost relatives and jobs, had babies, landscaped their gardens, watched all of The Wire—we’re not the same as we were, our collective identities have changed, and we may find that we don’t want to do and say the same things we used to. That’s OK, I think. Maybe it’s healthy.
In her brilliant book My Wild and Sleepless Nights (Penguin, 2021) mother-of-five Clover Stroud writes of the Official move I’m high shirt in addition I really love this newborn period: “These days pass so slowly, but are over too fast.” Part of me feels grateful that I had nowhere to be for the first six months of my son’s life. I was never distracted trying to sound relevant and like my old self in conversation in the pub juggling breastfeeding and a roast dinner. My one maternity-leave fantasy, pre-pandemic, was going to art galleries with the baby—I thought that sounded nice. Now things have opened back up again, I realize that I am just as content with my local park, looking at the huge red poppies and bright pink peonies. I’ve learned, as poet William Blake wrote, “To see the world in a grain of sand.”
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