On "losing myself" while parenting

Fair warning: this is a pseudo rant. I may or may not actually agree with myself a week from now.

Here goes...

Ever since I became a mom at the tail end of my 25th year here on Earth, I've felt bombarded by the "Don't lose yourself in motherhood" message. Running a google search on "lose yourself motherhood" yields nearly 100,000 results. Click on any one of these results and you'll find tales of woe about "I used to be a professional ballet dancer and now I'm 30 lbs overweight and can't plie to save my life" or "my baby doesn't sleep well and now my husband and I can't have wild jungle-animal sex for hours and hours a night" or "I used to work 60 hours a week and had a satisfying career and the respect of my professional peers." I have a pact with myself not to re-read too many past posts so for all I know I've spent too much bandwidth complaining about losing myself since I've been a mom, too.

Here's the thing -- deciding to become a parent means accepting that your life will be forever changed. The first night home from the hospital with that sweet, screeching fruit of your loins (I hate the words "loins") ought to smack that into pretty much anybody.

Because I started having kids relatively young, my experience is definitely different from so many of the women I know in academia. When I had my first, I was at the very beginning of my career, only a little over 3 years out of grad school, and working in a challenging, albeit friendly and relatively relaxed professional environment. I had a taste of the professional "good life" -- traveling to some pretty great places (UK, Austria, Kenya, + lots of US destinations as well), publishing some pretty great papers, and developing professional relationships with the "bigwigs" in my field. My ego loved it and because Mr. K was also at the early stages of his career, we didn't mind the challenging schedules. When I had to work on the weekends, he rode his bike. When he had to work late, I went out for drinks with co-workers. We were happy but we really wanted more. When Mr. K turned 30, he (seemingly overnight) got over his fear of having kids and was ready to take on the next stage of our lives. I had been (playing lip service to being) ready since I finished grad school. The reality of it was far scarier but we went for it and got an adorable and wonderful baby girl out of the deal (who slept all of 5 minutes in the first 18 months of her life but that's beside the point... I think).

Mr. K and I struggled with our (individual and collective) selfishness over the first few (as in 12. I kid... kinda) years, and decided to have another kid when C was about 2 years old. This decision meant we had to re-assess our career paths. I didn't make enough money to really make it worth it to pay for child care for 2 kids so I could go back to work shortly after baby number 2 like I did when C was born. We looked over the finances and took stock of the value each of us placed on our careers. I realized I didn't have the ambition to be a PhD-level scientists and even if I did, it would be a certain ticket to unknown destinations. The market in our town is saturated by highly qualified ecologists and I just didn't have that "Eye of the Tiger" focus needed to make my mark in the broader scene. Mr. K has always enjoyed his work and was finally making pretty good money at it, so we decided I would stay home.

I had a blast being a stay at home mom to C+R for the first year or so. Then I started getting those messages again - from friends, media, former co-workers, probably even myself. It was time to go back to work. So... I did. I sorted out child care for R (C was in preschool a few days a week), got a job, started working, stressed a lot about whether I was doing the right thing for my kids, and then, completely unexpectedly, got pregnant with baby #3.

Hyperventilation ensued. Stress mounted. I had a baby. She rocks.

I so deeply feared this whole "losing myself in motherhood" thing that I ended up losing myself in trying like mad to not lose myself. I kinda lost myself.

Now, sitting here with 11 more years until I no longer have minor children (and 6 more years until my first one flies the coop), I wish I would have worried less about losing myself. Parenthood is all about losing ourselves. It's about becoming less selfish, nurturing other people, exploring the interests of the little people we brought into our family. Along the way, I've explored new things I never would have cared about had it not been for my kids (percussion! amphibians! sports! The Tillamook Cheese Factory!) and I've found a whole new side to myself and yes... I have "lost" some of who I was before kids.

I've also been frustrated, gained and lost and gained weight, wished for an alternate reality where my list of responsibilities consist of a month-to-month lease on a furnished one-bedroom apartment and a plastic plant, gotten mad at myself for focusing my entire social life on the parents of the people my kids got along with, and, in the end, realized that I most likely would have made all of the same mistakes with kids or without.

My life would be very different without kids. Some things might be better, many would be worse. I'm really going to try not to wish these years away by making sure I'm still "myself" on the other end. I have a feeling I'll quickly find new interests when the time comes but for now, I'm hard pressed to find anything more interesting than watching three kids and all of the other lives that touch them evolve.

If what people mean when they say "Don't lose yourself" is really "Don't become a miserable slob just because you have kids" then I hear the message. I do have things to work on for my health and happiness and I'm a smidgen ticked off that I can't blame them on my kids.

Does this mean they don't get to blame me for all of their shortcomings?

Fingers crossed.