Who am I again?

Whatever the circumstances leading up to your entry into parenthood (planned/unplanned, wanted/unwanted, or perhaps a sloshy stew, mixed with all of the aforementioned scenarios), you will be swept into a transformative time. A new baby requires an enormous amount of focus and care which, most often, is an instinctual response from new parents. You have prepared for this little human’s arrival for quite a while and know that they will need you for pretty much everything.

There is an element of this that is critical for baby’s survival and logically linked to evolution and supported by research: if a mother was hyper-vigilant, her offspring would survive. We don’t live in such a survival-based world now. However, this evolutionary tendency for vigilance and laser focus on baby’s needs lingers. It can sometimes be all-consuming so as to push any and all attention to our own needs to the outer limits.

And then where does that leave you, and your sense of who you are? It could seem like that sense of self is floating in a galaxy far, far away…possibly feeling out of reach.

So, what to do? Can there be a balance of being an attentive new parent AND staying in touch with yourself?

Yes.

You do need to prioritize caring for your baby, of course. But you can also fit in small moments of self-care (the things that make you feel GOOD) and maintaining those pieces of “you”. This will take some help though. Lean on those support people around you to allow you these restorative moments; it will very likely help you to hang on to the threads of who you were pre-baby and hopefully weave those threads into who you have become as a new mom or dad.