Somewhere between the first pediatric appointment and the 50 school form and the night where you realized you couldn’t remember the last time someone asked how you were doing and actually waited for the answer, a version of yourself quietly moved out. She just gradually stopped having room in the schedule, and eventually stopped asking to be included.
Most mothers know exactly who they are. Wife, mom, caretaker, the one who remembers the dentist appointments and the library books and whose turn it is to bring snacks. What gets hazier, for a lot of them, is who they were before all of that started. And even hazier: who they still are underneath it.
The Problem With Selfless
Somewhere along the way, the word “selfless” got attached to motherhood like a compliment. Like the more of yourself you give away, the better you’re doing. Glennon Doyle wrote about this in Untamed with a clarity that’s hard to look away from: “Mothers have martyred themselves in their children’s names since the beginning of time. We have lived as if she who disappears the most, loves the most. What a terrible burden for children to bear, to know that they are the reason their mother stopped living.”
That’s a much older question: what does a woman owe, exactly, and to whom, and at what cost to herself? For generations, the answer handed to women was “everything, to everyone, forever.” And the women who lived that answer often raised daughters who felt quietly guilty for wanting something different, and sons who expected the same from their own future partners.
Michelle Obama said it differently but landed in the same place: “She’d say being a good mother isn’t all about sacrificing. It’s really investing and putting yourself higher on your priority list.” Her mother said that to her. And it still took years to believe it.
What Gets Lost When a Woman Disappears Into a Role
The honest version of this conversation is that most mothers don’t lose themselves all at once. It happens incrementally, in the small choices that each feel reasonable in the moment. You stop going to the class because drop-off runs late. You stop reading because by the time the kids are asleep you’re too tired for anything that requires focus. You say yes to another school committee because nobody else stepped up. You make your own needs shorter and shorter until they fit in the gaps, and eventually the gaps close entirely.
Gloria Steinem named something important here in Moving Beyond Words: “Most of us are living out the unlived lives of our mothers, because they weren’t able to become the unique people they were born to be.” It gets passed down, that disappearing act. A daughter watches her mother shrink herself, and she learns that this is what love looks like. And then she grows up and does the same, usually without noticing she learned it somewhere.
Audre Lorde refused to let any single role define her entirely. “I am not just a lesbian. I am not just a poet. I am not just a mother. Honor the complexity of your vision and yourselves,” she said in Conversations with Audre Lorde. The radical thing about that sentence isn’t any of the individual labels. It’s the refusal to let any one of them be the whole story.
Caring for Yourself Is Not the Opposite of Caring for Others
The pushback that tends to come here, and it’s a real one, is that this all sounds easier to say than to do. Putting yourself higher on the priority list sounds lovely in theory. In practice there are children who need things, a household that needs running, and often a job on top of that. The math of a modern mother’s day doesn’t always leave room for self-preservation as a concept, let alone as a practice.
But Audre Lorde’s line from A Burst of Light is worth sitting with: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It’s self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” She wasn’t writing a wellness blog. She wrote that in 1988 while dealing with cancer and raising kids and trying to do her work. Self-preservation wasn’t a luxury to her. It was the condition under which everything else became possible.
Brené Brown’s version of the same idea is more personal: “Owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that we’ll ever do.” Not loving ourselves once we’ve earned it, after we’ve figured everything out, or when the kids are older and life quiets down. Through the process. Right now, inside the chaos, before it resolves into something cleaner.
You Were a Person Before You Were a Mother
This is the part that tends to catch women off guard because it’s being a full person regardless of the role. Toni Morrison’s line from Song of Solomon lives here: “If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down.” The things she’s talking about aren’t other people. They’re the stories about who you’re supposed to be, what you’re supposed to want, how much of yourself you’re supposed to give before you’re allowed to stop.
Cheryl Strayed’s version of this is rougher and more honest than most: “These things are your becoming.” She wrote it about the long, directionless years before she found her footing, the waitressing jobs and the journal entries and the walks that didn’t go anywhere. The years that looked like nothing from the outside and turned out to be everything. The version of you that existed before the roles piled up was the foundation.
The sentence that tends to cut through the noise for a lot of women is Glennon Doyle’s in Untamed: “Selfless women make for an efficient society but not a beautiful, true, or just one. When women lose themselves, the world loses its way. We do not need more selfless women.”
This is a reminder that the world isn’t actually better served by women who have erased themselves. The woman you were before the roles is part of what makes the mother worth being.
What “Whole” Actually Looks Like in Real Life
It doesn’t look like a spa day, despite what every Mother’s Day ad wants you to believe. It looks more like: knowing what you think about something and saying it. Having at least one thing in your life that exists purely for you because it’s yours. Being able to answer the question “how are you actually doing” with something more specific than “fine” or “tired.”
Brené Brown wrote in Daring Greatly: “Yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn’t change the truth that I am brave and worthy of love and belonging.” The bravery isn’t in managing everything flawlessly. It’s in continuing to show up as a full person, with needs and preferences and a self that exists independent of anyone else’s schedule.
Jane Fonda said it cleanly: “The challenge is not to be perfect. It’s to be whole.” Whole includes the exhausted parts and the parts that haven’t figured it out yet and the parts that still want things they haven’t made room for. All of it counts.
Key Takeaway
These beautiful quotes for women actually ask something quieter: to remember that the person you were before all the roles arrived is still in there, and she’s the foundation. Every version of yourself you’ve set aside to make room for everyone else didn’t disappear. She just needs to be invited back in, a little at a time, starting now, in whatever small way the day actually allows.
The woman holding everything together deserves to be held too. Even if just by herself first.
What was your experience? Have you been blocked before? Or maybe you’re still wondering which one happened to you?
Drop a comment below and share your story, honestly we’d love to hear what you went through.
