Parenthood

I love my children more than anything. So why do I sometimes miss the person I was before I had them?

There are few things we are expected to feel quite as unequivocally positive about as becoming a parent. We can talk about how exhausting it is, joke about never sleeping and complain about the endless washing, but there are other thoughts that can feel much harder to admit. That you miss your old life. That sometimes you want to be left completely alone. That you love your children more than you knew possible and, occasionally, wonder what your life might have looked like if you hadn't had them.

These thoughts can feel shocking, particularly when parenthood was something you desperately wanted. Perhaps you spent years trying to conceive, experienced fertility treatment or loss, or simply always imagined yourself becoming a mother or father. Then the baby arrives and alongside all the love there can be boredom, resentment, anxiety, loneliness and an unexpected sense of loss. We don't talk enough about the fact that becoming a parent involves gaining somebody extraordinary while also saying goodbye to parts of the life you had before.

Who was I before I became someone's parent?

Parenthood changes the practical shape of life almost overnight. Your time is no longer entirely yours. Your relationships change. Your body may have changed. Work can feel different. Friendships shift and spontaneity becomes a distant memory. But the psychological change can be just as significant. Suddenly there is another person whose needs matter enormously, and for a while they may matter almost all of the time. It can be easy to become so absorbed in being Mum or Dad that you lose sight of the person underneath.

You might still have the career, friends, partner and life you had before, yet somehow feel that your identity has narrowed. Everybody asks about the baby. Your days are organised around somebody else's needs and your own wants can begin to feel almost indulgent. Missing who you were before doesn't mean you don't love who you have become. Both can be true.

The pressure to get parenting right

Parenthood seems to come with an extraordinary amount of advice. There are books, podcasts, parenting experts and social media accounts ready to tell us how our children should sleep, eat, play, learn, attach and behave. Much of it can be genuinely useful, but it can also leave us with the uncomfortable impression that one wrong move is going to ruin our child forever. For anyone already prone to perfectionism, parenting provides almost unlimited material.

The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott introduced the idea of the good enough mother, which I think remains wonderfully reassuring. The point wasn't that parents shouldn't care or try. It was that children don't require flawless parenting. In fact, ordinary moments when we get things wrong and then reconnect are part of family life.

You will lose your patience sometimes. You will be distracted. You will say something you wish you hadn't. There will be evenings when dinner is whatever you can find in the freezer and days when your carefully considered parenting philosophy disappears somewhere around 7.15am. Being a good parent isn't about never getting it wrong. What matters is also what happens afterwards.

Then our own childhood turns up

One of the more surprising things about becoming a parent is how much it can make us think about the way we ourselves were parented. Experiences we haven't considered for years can suddenly feel very close. Perhaps you hear your mother's words coming out of your mouth and think, I swore I'd never say that. Or you find yourself determined to give your children everything you didn't have. Sometimes watching your partner parent can bring up feelings about your own childhood that you weren't expecting.

Most of us carry something from the families we grew up in. Ideas about love, conflict, affection, achievement, money, emotions and what a family is supposed to look like can travel remarkably easily from one generation to another. Therapy isn't about sitting around blaming our parents for everything. They had histories too, and often did the best they could with what they had. But understanding what came before us can help us notice what we are carrying forward without realising it. There can be something incredibly powerful about recognising a pattern and deciding that it doesn't have to continue in quite the same way.

When family life isn't the family life you imagined

Families rarely stay in the shape we originally pictured. Relationships end. People meet new partners. Children move between homes. Step parents arrive and two sets of family traditions, expectations and personalities suddenly need to coexist.

Blended family life can be wonderful, but it can also be complicated. You can love your new family and still find it difficult. Children may feel loyal to another parent. An ex partner may remain a significant presence in your life whether you like it or not. You may be trying to build something new while everybody involved is carrying feelings about what came before. There isn't always a neat solution. Sometimes the work is learning what belongs to you and what doesn't. You can't control how an ex behaves, how quickly a child accepts a new partner or whether everybody feels like one happy family. You can think about the kind of parent or partner you want to be, the boundaries you need and how to create as much security as possible within the family you actually have.

What nobody tells you about loving your children

Love doesn't cancel out frustration. You can adore your children and find them incredibly annoying. You can be grateful for your family and desperately want a weekend away from them. You can enjoy being a parent and miss being able to leave the house without knowing where everybody's shoes are. None of these things are particularly extraordinary, but they can feel shameful because we have created such an idealised picture of how parenthood is supposed to feel.

Sometimes the most helpful thing is simply being able to say the unsayable somewhere without immediately being reassured that you don't really mean it. Perhaps sometimes you do wish you could have your old life back for a day. We can be curious about what that feeling is telling us rather than judging it.

Maybe you need more space. Maybe you are exhausted. Maybe something important to you has disappeared beneath the demands of family life. Maybe your relationship has become entirely about logistics. Or perhaps you simply need to remember that being a parent is one part of who you are, not the whole of you.

How can therapy help?

Therapy can offer somewhere to think about the parent you are, the parent you had and the person you are outside parenthood. It can help us understand why particular moments with our children affect us so strongly, why certain family patterns keep repeating and why we sometimes respond in ways that don't feel like the parent we intended to be. It can also give us somewhere to talk about the less polished parts of family life. The resentment, guilt, anger, loneliness, loss of identity and the occasional fantasy of checking into a hotel by yourself and not telling anyone the room number.

The aim isn't perfect parenting. Perfect parents don't exist, and trying to become one is exhausting for everybody involved. Perhaps something kinder is possible. To understand ourselves a little better, repair things when they go wrong, take responsibility for what belongs to us and allow our children to be separate people rather than asking them to heal the things we haven't been able to heal ourselves. We can't rewrite the family we came from, and we won't get everything right in the family we're creating. But we can become more conscious of what we pass on.

And perhaps being good enough really is good enough.