Motherhood Statements: Identity, Ambition and the Stories We Tell Ourselves

"What did you name your daughter?" asked the therapist.

"Son", I corrected automatically, absently before I thought of asking, "Why?" (In a therapy session, the answer had to have a deeper significance, right? Or maybe not)

I am a planner... I generally like to have trackers and checklists. This therapy session that I had signed up for just before rejoining work after mat leave, was an instance of this instinct for planning and preparation in action. I had heard from many colleagues and friends that the transition back to work would be fraught with anxiety, self-doubt... the works. I wanted to be prepared. I had sought therapy to prevent or at least plan for the havoc that the transition was supposed to wreak.

"Well, Panacea would have been a good choice of name." said the therapist. He was alluding to my self-reflection a little earlier in the conversation on how parenthood was perhaps responsible for the "unspooling" of my identity... how maternity leave had given me the space to dissociate and declutter. Or at least that's the story I was telling myself.

Of late, my LinkedIn feed has been inundated by stories of motherhood...The perks of personalization, if you will. I've become a sucker for such posts. And not just because I find a lot of them insightful and inspiring. But I like noticing patterns among them. Right from the garden variety #lessonsfrommotherhood to stories of courage and vulnerability to those infused with emotion.

If you're a new-ish mom, you probably get a helping of these too. Maybe you try to locate yourself in them... to use their scripts to make sense of your own experience. Maybe, these stories provide you with the archetypes of motherhood... the personas that you can slip on interchangeably... for instance, today you're playing the 'working mom' who reaches the belated realization - many a sleepless night later - that motherhood does, in fact, impact careers... tomorrow you could be the free spirit who abandons conventional career tracks and redefines her career around her passion. On some days you're the mom on a career break who's figuring things out just as so many others who share their stories are.

Naturally, while motherhood posts were the trigger, this is a larger phenomenon...We slip in and out of the narratives others have laid out and use them to anchor our realities.. to legitimize our struggles. And while this helps us make meaning out of our experiences, too often, we might rush to find the 'moral' in stories that are still unfolding and evolving.?

As I said, I am a planner and it's not easy for me, but I am learning that there is a certain freedom in embracing the incompleteness of our stories... that it's possible to draw strength not only from the retrospective lessons of carefully curated stories but equally or more from accessing the beautiful fragility and impermanence of our experience.

So, if you're contemplating or working through a career change, while navigating motherhood or any significant life transition... as you continue to seek inspiration in stories, here's a helpful reminder in the timeless words of Rilke, "Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”