One of the most common things women say about motherhood is that they lost themselves.
I understand why.
Motherhood changes nearly every part of life. Our days become filled with meals, laundry, appointments, bedtime routines, and the countless responsibilities that come with caring for a family. It is easy to look up one day and realize that much of what occupies our time now did not exist before children.
Yet while I understand why many women feel this way, I have often felt the opposite.
In many ways, I have never felt more myself than I do as a mother.
Not because motherhood has replaced who I am, but because it has given me new people to share my life with.
Somewhere along the way, many women began believing that becoming a good mother required setting aside the things that made them who they were. The books they read. The hobbies they enjoyed. The music they loved. The interests they pursued. As though motherhood and personhood were somehow competing with one another.
But I do not think they are.
Motherhood Weaves Who We Are Into Childhood
Children are shaped by the ordinary things their mother loves.
Not only by the lessons she intentionally teaches or the values she works hard to instill, but by the atmosphere of everyday life.
I love French culture, so French music fills our home while I cook. My home is filled with french antiques and books on french decorating. Yes, my home is childproofed, but it is still a home that reflects what I find beautiful rather than a space designed solely around practicality.
I love old-world stories and European culture, so my children are growing up with movies like Aristocats and Robin Hood.
I enjoy getting dressed in the morning and looking put together, so my daughter has fallen in love with my wearing dresses and going through my closet with me.
Becoming a mother did not make the things I love disappear. Instead, many of them became things I could share with my children. I’ll go even further: in some ways, having children gave me permission to fully embrace the whimsical things I had always loved.
Children Are Shaped by the Things Their Mother Loves
I believe a woman remaining connected to the things she loves enriches her children, provided those things are good, beautiful, and worthy of being passed on.
A child benefits from a home filled with lovely things that reflect the interests and tastes of the people who live there. Through them, children learn to appreciate beauty, atmosphere, tradition, and the feeling of home.
A child benefits from music that extends beyond what is marketed specifically to children. They learn the beauty of jazz, classical music, hymns, worship music, and songs that celebrate life.
A child benefits from seeing a mother who continues to put some effort in her appearance. Not because she is vain but because she demonstrates that elegant womanhood does not end when motherhood begins.
A child benefits from seeing books on the nightstand, flowers in the garden, meals prepared with care, and traditions that return year after year.
These things may seem small, but childhood is largely built from small things.
Years later, children often remember far more than the activities planned for them. They remember the atmosphere of home, the things their mother loved, and the world she created around them.
In this way, a woman’s interests are not distractions from motherhood. They often become part of the childhood she creates.
To this day, I look at much of what I love in life that makes up who I am, and I credit that to my own mother’s likes rubbing off onto me.
The World We Leave Behind
Years from now, our children may not remember every outing, every toy, or every activity we planned for them.
But they may remember the music that drifted through the house, the books stacked beside our bed, the meals we loved to make, the traditions we returned to, and the beauty we brought into ordinary days.
They may remember the things that made us who we were.
Perhaps that is one of the quiet gifts of motherhood. The loves we carry do not end with us. They become part of the childhood we create and, in some small way, part of the people our children become.
Motherhood doesn’t erase who we are as women. It weaves who we are into the children we are raising.