I love my children more than I’ve loved anything, but I still grieve the life I gave up to have them, and I’m tired of pretending those two things can’t be true at once

My kids are happy. I can say that without hedging — they’re curious, easy with people, and know they are loved, unconditionally.

A good amount of that is my doing, and I won’t pretend otherwise to sound modest. I’m the one who built the steady thing they get to stand on. And I wouldn’t undo any of it.

I have to say that plainly, because of what comes next: I love them more than I’ve loved anything, more than I knew I could. Nothing here is a complaint about them.

But there’s a grief I’ve mostly kept to myself — about the life I set down in order to pick them up — and I’m tired of pretending it cancels the love, or that the love is supposed to erase it.

For years, I believed I had to choose which one was the real feeling. I don’t believe that anymore.

Before them, I had a whole life, and it was mine

I was a set designer, and a good one — I’d worked my way up to running my own crew, and the shows kept getting bigger.

People in my world knew my name; there was a small regional award on a shelf and a line about me in a trade magazine I’d taped inside a cabinet door. The work was long, and I took the hours nobody else wanted: the empty theater at one in the morning, a problem to solve and no one to answer to.

My time was my own to spend or waste. I’d decide on a Thursday to drive to the coast and be gone by dark. I read in long uninterrupted stretches, had strange hours, and ate dinner at eleven. My body answered to nothing but me — it slept when it wanted and went where I sent it.

I had money that I could spend only on myself, firm opinions about restaurants, and an apartment arranged perfectly to my liking.

Most days, I was the main character of my own life. I’m not bragging, and I’m not pining — for now, I’m only describing it, the way I’d walk through a house I used to live in.

Missing that life feels like a betrayal

When I look at that list, I miss it. Not all the time, but there are evenings, after they’re down, when the missing arrives fully formed and settles in next to me on the couch.

And the instant I feel it, something shows up right behind it: the sense that I have no right to.

I chose this. I wanted this — I went through a lot to raise these specific children. They are healthy and funny and mine.

So what kind of mother sits in a quiet house, mourning the woman who used to drive to the coast on a whim? It feels obscene to grieve a life when the thing that replaced it is two people I would die for.

And the judgment won a lot, so I did what I think a lot of mothers do: I packed the grief away and called the silence gratitude. If I never said it, maybe it wasn’t real, and maybe that made me the good, grateful mother I was supposed to be. What I didn’t have, back then, was the word for what I was going through.

There’s a term reproductive psychologists use — matrescence — for the long transition into being a mother.

Becoming a mom adds someone to the equation, yes, but it also asks a woman to say goodbye to parts of who she was and to build someone new in the gap. The loss is sewn into the process.

It’s an expected part of it, not a malfunction in me. Reading that, the grief stopped looking like proof that I was ungrateful and started looking like something most mothers walk through, a lot of them in silence, too.

Nobody told me both could be true on the same day

The word for the loss helped.

What changed more was learning that the contradiction I thought I was living wasn’t a contradiction at all.

There’s a name for this part too: maternal ambivalence — the ordinary fact that a mother can hold love and resentment, gratitude and grief, tenderness and the urge to flee, often in the same hour.

It’s described as one of the most common and least admitted parts of motherhood. The feelings don’t take turns being true. They run at the same time.

It also cleared up something I’d been scared of — that missing my old life meant, somewhere underneath, I wished my children weren’t in it. It doesn’t. Wanting the woman I used to be is a different thing from not wanting them; the two had fused in my head, and prying them apart was its own kind of relief.

I went looking for why it had taken me so long to see it, and I found the trouble in a single word I’d been using on myself. I love them, but I grieve who I was. But. That word pits the two against each other and insists only one of them can be the real one — and since the love was never up for debate, the grief had to be the liar.

Eventually, I picked up the swap that undid it: trading the but for an and. I love them, and I grieve who I was.

Said that way, nothing has to lose. The love isn’t weakened by the grief, and the grief stops working as a charge against my mothering. They were never the same question. They’re two true things about one life, sitting side by side, the way two true things often do.

I stopped trying to talk myself out of half of it

Knowing the names for it didn’t dissolve the grief, and I’ve stopped waiting for it to.

The grief still turns up on those late evenings. What’s different is what I do when it comes.

The first thing that changed was that I said it out loud. I told one friend — a mother herself — the whole unflattering truth: that I love my children without reservation, that I miss the woman who used to exist, and that some days the second feeling is loud. She didn’t flinch. She said, Me too, and the relief of that was enormous.

The second thing is smaller and more practical.

I started giving the old life little pieces of itself back. The whole thing isn’t on offer, and I wouldn’t take it at their expense anyway. But pieces, I could have: one afternoon a week that belongs to no one but me, a freelance project I picked up for no reason except that it’s the kind of work I used to love, a weekend away — my first in years — where I was nobody’s mother for forty-eight hours and then drove home wanting to see them so badly it ached.

None of this fixed anything, because nothing was broken.

The grief and the love still travel together. Some days the love is so large the grief is a footnote. Some days, I close the bathroom door and cry for the coast and the one-in-the-morning theater and the woman who answered to no one — and then I wash my face and tell my kids I love them, and I mean every word of it.

Editor’s Note: “As Told to Bolde” stories are inspired by reader submissions, interviews, and accounts shared with our editorial team. Details are sometimes edited, combined, or dramatized, and our editors use AI tools in the writing process. See our Editorial Policy.

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