The Grief No One Talks About When You Become A Mom

You’re on the verge of tears after finally getting the baby down for a nap. You’re upset that your group chat has gone quiet. Or maybe you’re longing for your old life when you could leave the house on a whim without worrying about your boobs leaking or the babysitter calling to say the baby is inconsolable.

Sound familiar? Even if you’re over-the-moon in love with your baby, you might feel a sense of loss during the transition to motherhood. “Grief can be a very normal and even healthy part of becoming a mother,” says psychiatrist Misty Richards, M.D., cofounder and medical director of perinatal psychiatry at UCLA’s Maternal Outpatient Mental Health Services Clinic. “When we transition into any new identity or role, we inevitably shed certain layers of ourselves to make room for new ones.”

Nevertheless, if that shedding makes life hard for you to enjoy, there are ways to get through it.

Why Grief Is Common During Postpartum

The process of having a baby isn't over once the newborn is weighed, cleaned, and dropped into your arms. In fact, that’s when matrescence, or the immense and complex evolution into motherhood, really begins. You can think of matrescence as “the push and pull between becoming the mother you imagined you would be, and holding onto the parts of yourself that existed before motherhood and that you don’t necessarily want to sacrifice or give up,” says Richards.

Matrescence is a major milestone in a person’s life, says Aurélie Athan, Ph.D., clinical psychologist and principal investigator at the Khora Reproductive & Maternal Wellbeing Lab at Columbia University, who puts it on par with adolescence. “They're both developmental life stages," she says. “Matrescence is a second puberty — biologically, psychologically, socially, everything undergoes a doubt process, an interrogation, and a reimagination.”

Your mind is rewired. A study in Trends in Cognitive Sciences states that the unique changes that occur in a mom’s brain after welcoming a child are lifelong and may actually lead to increased cognitive reserve later in life.

The changes that come with the postpartum period and settling into your new role as a caregiver and parent touch every aspect of your life, says Athan. From relationships with your partner and friends, your career, and your finances to deeper shifts in what gives you meaning and purpose, everything changes in some way, she says.

With all of this change comes the potential for a lot of sadness. “There is an enormous physiologic and hormonal shift following pregnancy and delivery, often significant sleep deprivation, and then this massive identity transformation — along with the immediate expectation that somehow you should know how to mother,” says Dr. Richards.

These feelings of grief can be disarming, especially when internal and external pressure tells you that this should be one of the happiest times of your life. But being mournful doesn’t have to mean that you regret becoming a mom or don’t love your baby. “You can be profoundly grateful for your child and still miss parts of your old life,” says Richards. “Both things can be true.”

How Grief Intersects with Postpartum Depression

It’s easy to conflate grief with postpartum “baby blues.” Postpartum grief can exist on its own or coincide with general feelings of sadness or the “baby blues” that can come on directly following childbirth and typically resolve on their own within two weeks after delivery.

However, grief can also arise in parallel with postpartum depression (PPD), a type of perinatal mood disorder. These conditions “involve a constellation of symptoms that are more persistent, severe, or disruptive to a person’s functioning and quality of life,” says Richards. “The distinction is important because we want to make room for normal emotional complexity without minimizing genuine psychiatric illness.”

If your grief starts to interfere with your ability to function, care for yourself, connect with others, or experience pleasure in your life, that’s when you want to consult a mental health care provider, she says.

How to Process and Grow from Postpartum Grief

Anyone who’s ever experienced a major loss knows that grief isn’t something you can “get over.” It’s a process — and one that starts with identifying and acknowledging the source. For example, maybe you used to take a weekend morning workout class, but now you’re always exhausted, or the baby’s schedule doesn’t align. Or maybe you had high hopes for your in-laws helping out more, but they haven’t stepped up.

Acknowledge the different things that might be contributing to your sense of sadness, or even say it out loud, says Richards. If you can’t land on a specific thing, that’s okay. “Sometimes the most important reframe is simply acknowledging the painful gap between the motherhood we imagined and the motherhood we are actually living,” she says. “That gap is incredibly common, and talking about it can be freeing.”

Once you have an idea of what you’re grieving, reflect on it. Pause to ask, ‘What am I feeling? What’s missing in my life? What do I need right now?’ Investigating “can keep grief from becoming buried under negative self-talk and the pressure to appear as though everything is fine,” says Richards.

Journaling, or writing down your feelings and then revisiting them, can help you see things with a fresh perspective, says Athan. You can also involve other people. "Community can be incredibly restorative,” says Dr. Richards. “Hearing another mother say, ‘I felt that too,’ can loosen some of the shame and isolation around these feelings.”

Use this insight to determine what to do next, says Athan, who calls grief a “reconstruction process” and “an opportunity.” With postpartum grief, you're effectively leaving the world you constructed — the pre-kid freedom — and creating a new world for yourself. The morning routine you knew might be on hold indefinitely, or you might struggle to schedule time with friends, but that leaves room for fresh habits to form and new connections to make.

In other words: You’re moving on. There’s no going back; instead, “learning from [your grief] to move forward and forge a new path,” says Athan. Now that you’re busy making room for a baby in your life, you can be really intentional about what matters to you now, how you want to spend your time, and what kind of family you want to create, says Richards. That includes your career, friendships, marriage, and relationship with yourself.

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