I wrote about this already. A few weeks ago, different words, same ache. My name is not Mama. The body that doesn't belong to me anymore. The exhaustion of being someone's everything.
And here I am again.
I don't think that means I'm stuck. I think it means I haven't finished yet. That the thing is still happening and I'm still in the middle of it and pretending otherwise would be a lie.
So. Again. Bear with me.
I think part of motherhood is realizing how little of your body actually belongs to you anymore.
My youngest is in a clingy phase right now and I know, logically, that it’s developmentally normal. Secure attachment. Connection. Safety. All the things the parenting accounts tell you are good signs.
But emotionally? It’s suffocating me a little.
He wants me constantly lately. Held constantly. Touched constantly. Sitting on me while I try to drink coffee. Climbing into my lap while I answer messages. Wrapping himself around my legs while I cook dinner. If he could unzip my skin and crawl back inside my body, I honestly think he would.
And the worst part is that when I finally do get a break, when Nana walks through the door and I get the chance to leave for an hour, he bursts into tears the second he realizes I’m going somewhere without him.
That part hurts too.
There’s guilt in needing space from someone whose entire world is built around needing you.
At the same time, I can feel my hormones shifting again. The placebo week of my birth control hits and it’s like someone flips a switch in my nervous system. Not catastrophic like my PMDD used to be, but enough that everything suddenly feels sharper. Louder. More irritating.
The other day I found myself irrationally furious at a group of teenagers walking five abreast on the sidewalk while I tried to maneuver a stroller around them.
Honestly? No one should be allowed to walk five across. Criminal behavior.
But it wasn’t really about the teenagers.
It was the feeling underneath it. The exhaustion of constantly accommodating everyone else’s existence while feeling like there’s less and less room for your own.
And maybe that’s why I’ve become fully obsessed with Off Campus lately like half the female population apparently has. I started the books expecting mindless escapism and instead found myself weirdly emotional over them.
Not because I genuinely want to be twenty again. God no. I know too much now. I love my kids. I love my life.
But there’s something bittersweet about revisiting stories centered around freedom, desire, spontaneity, and people whose bodies still fully belong to themselves.
People who can leave their apartments at midnight because they feel like it.
People who can be messy without consequence.
People who aren’t carrying the invisible mental spreadsheet of snacks, naps, grocery lists, emotional regulation, and whether someone remembered to move the laundry over.
I don’t miss being young.
I think I miss existing without being needed every second of the day.
I don’t miss being twenty.
I don’t miss the insecurity. Or the chaos. Or the version of myself that thought exhaustion was a personality trait.
But I do miss the feeling of belonging entirely to myself.
My body was still mine then.
My thoughts were uninterrupted long enough to hear them.
Silence didn’t feel impossible to reach.
Now there’s always someone touching me, needing me, calling for me, climbing onto me, depending on me.
And I love them so much it aches.
But some days I catch myself grieving the version of me that could exist without constant access points.
Not because she was better.
Just because she was alone inside her own body.
Talk soon,
Tara
CEO of Chaos & Co.