There is a quiet story many of us inherit without ever being directly told it. That becoming a mother will naturally mean disappearing a little. Not in a dramatic way. Not all at once. But slowly, almost imperceptibly, as attention shifts outward and life becomes organised around everyone else’s needs.
This column is my way of gently questioning that story. Not from the outside looking in, but from within it. From the middle of early motherhood, identity shifts and the ongoing work of learning who I am now.
It is a place where I am trying to stay honest about matrescence — not as a concept, but as a lived experience. The way it stretches and rearranges us. The way it asks us to hold both love and disorientation at the same time. The way we do not so much “become” someone new as we slowly meet ourselves again in unfamiliar form.
Somewhere in all of this, I have found I keep returning to one thread.
Before we are mothers, we are women.
And she does not disappear. Even when she feels far away. Even when there is no obvious space for her. She is still here, moving alongside everything else.
The relationship between woman and mother
I used to think these two parts of me, the woman and the mother, were in competition. That there was a choice to be made between tending myself and tending my child properly, and another between being present for others and staying connected to myself.
But in practice, it has not felt like that. What I’ve noticed instead is that when I am more resourced, more grounded in myself, more able to listen inwardly, everything around me softens too. Not because I am trying harder, but because I am not constantly overriding myself to keep up.
Slower living, for me, has not been a philosophy I adopted, it has been something I’ve had to learn how to return to. Over and over again. And I have come to see that prioritising my own nervous system is not separate from motherhood — it is part of how I stay present inside it.
Not perfectly. Not consistently. But honestly.
What I keep coming back to
Slowness creates space to actually hear yourself again
Your needs are not separate from your capacity to care for others
You do not disappear because you are needed
A different pace of life changes how you meet yourself inside it.
On changing what gets passed on
Lately I find myself thinking less about doing motherhood well and more about what it means for a child to grow up alongside a woman who is still connected to herself. Not performatively. Not perfectly. Just in the ongoing return to self.
Because I can already see how easy it is for women to become invisible inside their own lives without ever intending to. To move through years orientated around everyone else and slowly lose the thread of themselves in the process.
And I don’t think this is inevitable. I think it is something that can be interrupted gently. Not by doing more or becoming better, but by noticing sooner — the moment we begin to leave ourselves — and choosing, even in small ways, to come back.
I believe something profound shifts when that happens.
When women remember who they are, they raise children who never have to forget.
When a woman is in her power she raises a different kind of generation — one where tenderness and truth are not in opposition, but can live side by side. When women rise, their homes, families and communities rise with them.
These are not abstract ideas for me. They are the quieter observations that keep returning as I move through my own life inside this. What I am learning is that presence, even to ourselves, is not something we perform, it is something we return to. Again and again.
If you find yourself here, reading this, and something in you recognises what I am describing — not as an idea, but as a feeling — then you are already closer to yourself than you might think.
There is no need to rush that.
You can stay with it slowly.
Rhi xx
