The Forty Files

I have been asking myself if I did the right thing by returning to work since the very first day I walked into the office.

It’s the first time I’ve worked outside the home in eleven years, and there were pieces of myself I remembered—the professional woman I was before motherhood, the parts of me I had set down while raising my girls. I was excited to pick them back up. To reclaim them. To remember what it felt like to be ambitious and capable and intellectually hungry in a way that had nothing to do with packing lunches or finding missing cleats.

And, honestly, those pieces came back surprisingly naturally. Like riding a bike.

What I naively underestimated was the chemical shift of motherhood.

There is something that happens when you become a mother that I don’t think you can fully understand until you experience it. Your heart is no longer entirely your own. Part of it is walking around outside of you, usually somewhere you cannot see it, and somehow you’re expected to sit at a desk and answer emails as though that isn’t completely insane.

I have to focus in a way that requires me to talk to my heart almost on the hour.

They’re okay. You’re okay.

I have to quiet the guilt when I can’t be there for the parent coffee, when I can’t do carline, when someone else gets the ordinary little moments that, for eleven years, I never had to miss.

And the truth is, I don’t know if I will ever love being away from them.

I don’t think I’m supposed to.

I am all for them getting their wings. I want them to grow into independent, capable women who know how to leave the nest and fly toward lives that belong entirely to them.

But I also know they need to see mine.

And that’s the part I’m still learning.

Because there is a strange grief in realizing that becoming more of yourself can sometimes mean being physically absent from the people who made you into so much of who you are.

I don’t have some beautifully packaged answer about returning to work, motherhood, identity, or how to do both without feeling like you’re failing at one of them.

Some days I feel proud of myself. Some days I feel guilty. Some days I feel both before 9 a.m.

And I want to note this openly and transparently: I’m sharing this because I’m still figuring it out. I suspect I’m not the only woman standing in that uncomfortable space between who she has been, who she is becoming, and the people she loves most fiercely.

Maybe motherhood isn’t about choosing between the woman you were and the mother you’ve become.

Maybe it’s about letting both women exist.

I’m beginning to understand that loving them deeply and wanting something for myself were never mutually exclusive.

So, for now, I’m learning to let them grow their wings while I learn to use mine again.

And maybe that’s the point—not choosing between being their mother and being myself, but showing them that a woman can be both.

Man, does it feel hard.