Motherhood Is Healing Me—But It’s Also Unearthing My Grief

 

I didn’t expect postpartum to feel like time travel.

Those first two months after giving birth to my first child were sacred and raw—but also familiar in a strange, aching way. As I watched my baby cry for me, sleep on my chest, and need me in ways only I could respond to—I couldn’t unsee the timeline. I was that age, too, when I was given up.

And suddenly, I wasn’t just a mother. I was also that baby again.

When I first became a mom, I expected to be tired. I expected to cry from hormones. But I didn’t expect to grieve parts of myself I hadn’t fully met yet.

Looking at my son in those early weeks—so dependent, so needing attachment—I started asking questions I didn’t even know were buried deep inside me:

• What if my baby will be taken away from me?

• What did that moment look like for my birth mother?

• What did it feel like for baby me?

The postpartum fog blurred into something else: a wave of abandonment fear. I worried about losing my child, about being separated. Sometimes I’d cry while holding him, not fully understanding why. In our counseling class, I was told that our body holds on to early memories, even if we don’t have words for them. That made so much sense. My body was remembering something my mind had buried.

Even though I grew up in a safe, loving adoptive family—and in many ways, felt very sheltered—I never thought of myself as resilient. I didn’t have any dramatic life struggles growing up. But then I saw myself through the eyes of my newborn.

I imagined baby me—just days old—being held by someone new. Someone safe, maybe, but not her mother. That shift, that loss, must have been confusing. The way my son needed my voice, my scent, my heartbeat—I realized, I needed those things too. And I lost them before I could even form a memory. I’ve carried that loss in my nervous system all this time.

And yet… baby me found a way to survive. To connect. To keep going.

That’s resilience.

There’s a psychological term for this: implicit memory—the kind of memory stored in our bodies before we can speak. It lives in our reactions, our patterns, our fears. And I think in those early postpartum months, some of mine were coming to the surface.

It was overwhelming. It is overwhelming.

But also—it’s healing me.

Motherhood is giving me the lens to see my story with new eyes. It’s breaking my heart open in new places, but it’s also helping me make space for that little girl I was. The one who didn’t get to choose any of it.

I don’t have a neat ending to this.

But if you’re reading this and you’ve felt that strange mix of love and grief, connection and fear—you’re not alone. You’re not dramatic. You’re not broken.

You’re remembering.

And remembering, I’m learning, is part of healing.

So I’ll leave you with this:

What would it look like to see yourself—not just as someone who made it—but as someone strong even before you knew what strength was?

We’ve been resilient all along.

Let’s keep going—gently.