Mindful Advocacy

Article I of the “Choosing Yourself Is Not Abandoning Your Children” Series

There is something almost accusatory in the question because women are taught, sometimes explicitly and sometimes through a thousand small messages, that once we become mothers, choosing ourselves means choosing ourselves over our children. A good mother sacrifices. A good mother puts her children first. A good mother makes it work, finds a way, keeps going. She does not complain about everything she gave up because, after all, she chose to become a mother.

Certainly, motherhood requires sacrifice. There were nights when my daughter needed me and sleep simply was not an option. There were bills that had to be paid before I could buy something I wanted. There were years when I worked more than I wanted to because there was no other choice. There were opportunities I could not take, places I could not go, and decisions that had to be made around the needs of another human being who depended on me. That is parenthood. But sacrifice is not the same thing as disappearing, and somewhere along the way we have confused the two.

We have created an image of the “good mother” as a woman who gives so completely that eventually there is very little of her left. Her children’s needs come first, followed by her partner’s, the house, work, aging parents, extended family, and everyone else’s crises, appointments, birthdays, preferences, disappointments, and feelings. Somewhere at the bottom of that list is a woman who once had interests, hopes, dreams, curiosities, ambitions, and a life she imagined for herself. If she says, “No, I can’t do that today,” she risks being called selfish. If she says, “No, I can’t do that anymore,” people may question her love. If she finally says, “I have spent enough of my life living for everyone else. I want something for myself now,” we ask again: What kind of mother chooses herself?

I think we have been asking the wrong question.

I did not understand how much of myself I had given away until I was dying. When I became severely ill with COVID, I had one of those moments when everything unnecessary falls away and you look at your life without the usual distractions. I looked back through the years and realized that I had done so many of the things I was supposed to do. I went to college. I got married. I became a mother. When my daughter’s father continued choosing drugs and pills over the responsibilities of being a partner and parent, I left him. Divorce devastated parts of our lives, because divorce often does, but I have never regretted leaving. I did not want my daughter growing up believing that living with active addiction, chaos, unpredictability, and instability was simply what marriage looked like. I did not want that to become her definition of normal. Instead, I did my best to provide her with a nice home, good educational opportunities, and extracurricular activities, all while living on my income and without receiving child support.

Afterward, I worked. Sometimes I worked two jobs. I paid bills. I tried to create stability. I worried constantly about whether I was giving my daughter enough. I worried about being a single mother. I worried about the relationships I had afterward and about the things she had lost because our family did not look the way I had once imagined it would. Because I loved her so much, I tried to compensate. I gave more. I tried harder. I sacrificed.

Then, lying there believing that my life might actually be ending, I realized something that hurt almost as much as being sick: I had spent most of my life living for other people. I had done so many of the “right” things, but I was not sure I had really lived my life. What about my needs, my wishes, my hopes, and my dreams? How many beautiful moments had I missed because I was trying to please everyone around me, fulfill their expectations, or become the person they believed I should be?

It would have been easy to blame everyone else. Certainly, other people had demanded things from me. My childhood taught me very early that self-sacrifice could be a survival strategy. I learned to keep the peace, anticipate other people’s emotions, make myself useful, and ask for very little. Those lessons followed me into adulthood. Motherhood gave them somewhere new to live. I wanted my daughter to have a good life, and because I knew there were ways in which her childhood had been difficult, I tried to make up for them. But during COVID, I also had to confront an uncomfortable truth: no matter how much other people expected from me, I had participated in my own disappearance. I had repeatedly agreed to give pieces of myself away.

That realization forced me to examine another feeling mothers are rarely permitted to admit: resentment. I loved my daughter deeply, but there were times when I resented the weight of single motherhood. I resented the responsibility. I resented that her father sacrificed so little while so much was expected of me. He went years without paying child support, and I did what mothers so often do when there is no one else stepping in: I worked more. Sometimes that meant taking a second job. My daughter did not always like that I worked so much, and I did not like it either, but the bills did not disappear because either of us wished things were different.

There is a difference between resenting your child and resenting the circumstances in which you are raising them. I wish I had not become pregnant so young. I have been honest with my daughter about that. I wish I had been older, more financially secure, and better prepared for the enormous responsibility of motherhood. But I have also told her, truthfully, that I am grateful I had her. Those statements are not mutually exclusive. We can wish the circumstances had been different without wishing the child had never existed.

Motherhood does require sacrifice. What it should not require is the sacrifice of the self.

I should be able to be a mother and still be a yogi, a reader, a runner, an employee, a friend, a wife, a traveler, a student, a writer, or whatever else I have the passion and time to become. Having a child does not mean every identity that existed before motherhood must be swallowed by the word “Mom.” In fact, I have come to believe that maintaining those other parts of ourselves is not something we do despite loving our children. It may be one of the ways we love them well.

Our children learn parenthood by watching us. Our daughters, especially, absorb what it means to be a woman and a mother not only from what we tell them but from what we demonstrate every day. We can tell our daughters to follow their dreams, demand respect, establish boundaries, leave unhealthy relationships, become financially independent, and refuse to shrink themselves for other people. But children are perceptive. They can smell hypocrisy from a mile away. If they hear us tell them to live boldly while watching us make ourselves smaller and smaller, they are receiving two different lessons. There is the lesson we speak, and there is the lesson we live. The lived lesson is often louder.

A daughter who watches her mother disappear may learn that this is what women do when they love their families. Women accommodate. Women organize. Women remember. Women carry. Women surrender. Women tell everyone else to follow their dreams while quietly burying their own. A son can absorb another version of the same lesson: this is what a “good woman” looks like. She carries everyone around her and asks little in return.

That is part of why these generational patterns are so difficult to recognize. They often begin with an act of love. A mother gives because she loves her children. She sacrifices because she wants them to have more. She postpones things because there is always something more urgent. None of those individual decisions may be harmful. The problem comes when sacrifice becomes the defining feature of motherhood and the mother gradually ceases to exist as a separate person.

Years later, that sacrifice can become emotional debt. “After everything I have done for you.” “I gave up my whole life for you.” “You owe me.” Perhaps no child ever asked for that sacrifice. Perhaps the mother believed it was required. Yet when she reaches middle age and discovers that her children are building lives that do not revolve around her, those old sacrifices can become evidence in a case she has been quietly building for years.

This is one reason I believe mothers need identities beyond their children. Eventually, children grow up. That is the goal. They no longer need us in the same ways. If being needed was our primary source of identity, their independence can feel like rejection rather than success. A mother who has spent decades defining herself through sacrifice may suddenly face a terrifying question: If nobody needs me anymore, who am I?

Maintaining a self does not guarantee that letting go will be easy. I do not think anything makes that easy. But it gives us somewhere to stand when the role of motherhood changes. Our children should not be responsible for providing us with an identity because we gave ours away raising them.

Choosing yourself also means becoming more honest about the difference between protecting a child and controlling them. Parents make countless decisions because we believe we are keeping our children safe. Sometimes we are. But sometimes what we call protection is really an attempt to manage our own fear. The distinction requires uncomfortable self-reflection. We have to ask whether a decision is truly about the child’s wellbeing or whether it is primarily helping us avoid anxiety, uncertainty, loneliness, or the possibility that our child will make a choice we would not make ourselves.

That does not mean parents should abandon judgment or responsibility. Children need limits. Teenagers are not adults, and parents sometimes must say no. But as children grow, autonomy becomes increasingly important. If we repeatedly hold them back from what they genuinely want because we are afraid, because we think we know better, or because their independence makes us uncomfortable, eventually they may come to resent the love that was supposed to protect them.

The same is true of boundaries in adult relationships with our children. A mother can genuinely love her child and still behave in ways that are not loving. Guilt-tripping is not loving because the person doing it loves you. Threatening to withdraw affection is not loving. Reminding an adult child of everything you sacrificed so they will comply with your wishes is not loving. Those actions may come from fear, loneliness, insecurity, or pain, but they are still attempts to get another person to behave in a way that relieves our own discomfort.

Love is not only what we feel. Love is also what we are willing to do with our feelings.

If my daughter tells me that I crossed a boundary, I may feel hurt. I may disagree with her. I may even privately think the boundary is unnecessary. But if I love her, I want to understand why it matters to her. I would rather know that she is angry with me than have her stay silent because she fears my reaction. I would rather be given the opportunity to repair something than maintain the illusion that everything between us is perfect.

I want my daughter and me to choose our relationship.

I do not want her to remain close to me because she believes she owes me for raising her. I do not want motherhood to become a debt she spends adulthood repaying. I want her to call me because she wants to talk to me, visit me because she wants to see me, tell me difficult things because she trusts that our relationship can survive the truth. That kind of relationship requires two separate people, not one person who sacrificed herself and another who is expected to compensate her for it.

For a long time, I thought being a good mother meant giving my daughter as much of myself as I possibly could. I understand now that there was another responsibility I had not fully considered: showing her that her mother was a person.

A person with interests. A person with dreams. A person capable of leaving something unhealthy. A person capable of changing her mind. A person who could love her child enormously and still say no. A person who was allowed to want something simply because she wanted it.

Our daughters do not only learn how to become mothers by watching us take care of them. They learn by watching what we believe women are allowed to become.

So perhaps the question is not, What kind of mother chooses herself?

Perhaps we should ask something else.

What does a daughter learn when her mother never does?

If our daughters learn more from the lives we live than from the advice we give them, then disappearing is also a lesson. So is staying small. So is resentment. So is allowing everyone else’s needs to define the boundaries of our lives.

And so is choosing ourselves.

Motherhood requires sacrifice. It requires compromise, responsibility, endurance, and countless occasions when another person’s needs legitimately come before our own. But love should not demand our disappearance.

Our children do not need mothers who cease to exist in order to prove how much they are loved.

They need to know that love and personhood can coexist.

They need to see that a woman can belong deeply to her family without ceasing to belong to herself.