My motherhood identity crisis

The one that was never about motherhood

Welcome to Getting Better. My name is Miriam, and I share weekly personal essays to offer moments of pause and reflection.  My pieces touch on motherhood, loss, chronic illness, and questions of human nature. I share all my work freely right now. Subscribe for free, or upgrade for the price of an oat milk latte — my favorite / unequivocally the best drink out there 🥰  Sign up here:

Reinhardt Redwood Regional Park, 2022, Miriam Cruz

I had an identity crisis when my baby was born.

I told myself (and all my friends) my crisis was about my career. I worked hard in high school to go to a great college, I worked hard in college to get a great job, and I worked hard in my jobs to earn more money and recognition. (My family finds this funny because my highest-paying job was my first out of college, and I’ve made successively less money ever since. But still. The intention was there!) After my son’s birth, I made pro / con lists for staying home, working part-time, working full-time, and opening a coffee shop and mindfulness studio. Every option had a dozen bullet points and question marks.

I realize now that it was never about those bullet points or question marks. Choosing any path provides temporary relief, but my unsettled soul still accompanies me. It’s not about what others call me or how the government taxes me, but rather how I choose to see myself.

I see myself as either everything or nothing.

My pains in life hold one of the two beliefs at their core — from intense depressive episodes (I am nothing) to indignation when things don’t go my way (I am everything) — when it turns out both are true.

This is old news to those who are wiser than me. Nisargadatta Maharaj’s words resonate every time I hear them: “Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. And between the two my life flows.” My willingness and eagerness to finally have learned this lesson came 8 months ago, with the arrival of my baby boy.

My baby will love me just the same if I work inside or outside of our home. His pupils will still dilate when he looks at me, he will still smile his toothy grin when he notices me in the room, and I will be the one wondering if I’m worthy of that love. That is the real question mark that I fear my boy will remember most of all.

I’m happy to pass along some of my traits — my ear for language or the tenor of my laugh. Both of these things bring me joy, and if he inherits either, it would be another sweet point of connection to hold dear.

But my heart will break if he inherits my tenuous self-love.

My identity crisis was never about my title, my salary, or my LinkedIn bio. It is about my unwillingness to know and to value myself as I am.

I’ve been caught up in the wrong question: should I pursue the salary or not? Do I deserve to be everything (salaried) or nothing (no income)? I see now that I won’t love either version of my life if I don’t first love myself, unconditionally, where I am today. Allowing my path to unfold from that place of self-confidence and respect — rather than self-loathing or neglect — feels more spacious and peaceful.

I thought I was everything, and everything meant I deserved everything, and everything meant a high-paying job and status and comfort and ease and joy and so much more.

In pursuit of everything my material mind could dream up, I reduced the definition to a base interpretation. I narrowed the possibility of the world that might make me happy, and I kept trying to squeeze myself into that tighter space while carrying more and more things. I want all the things. But the only way all the things fit in this space with me, is if I keep making myself smaller and smaller to accommodate them.

The love I hold for myself that comes and goes is rooted in this need to have everything; rooted in this belief that everything is the money, the job, the comfort. It’s a conditional love that’s caught up in this web of all the strings attached.

But I am not everything, not in this sense. I am everything in a much bigger sense — in the Everything with a capital E sense. And so are you. There’s no rush, no urgency, to claim it all for myself, because it’s vast enough to hold all of me, and all of you, and all of the small everythings that don’t really matter all that much. This spaciousness allows me to breathe again and to reconnect with my true nature of nothingness. My nothingness that sounds like a direct contradiction to my Everything, when in truth they are one and the same. The false contradiction shows us what it means to be ease and grace.

My baby and I go on a walk together every day. Most days, we look in the mirror before we head out. He laughs when he sees us there, and I wave at our reflections, always saying “I love you!” to us both. I’ve never meant it more when I look at his face. When I look at mine, there are still cobwebs. But I’m trying to clear them.

With every “I love you,” I blow a few away, in the hopes of letting more light in and clearing some space for my baby boy, too.