At 35, one mother set herself a structured challenge in rediscovering identity after motherhood: try one new thing for every year she had been alive. The project began not with a grand resolution but with a hiking trip that surprised her, and it led, among other things, to an afternoon on her knees on hot concrete, scooping watery paper pulp into a frame and producing something that looked, in her words, like ‘wet, nasty oatmeal.’
The backstory matters. She became a mother at 19, before she had, as she puts it, ‘fully figured out who I was as an adult.’ By the time many people her age were experimenting with what they liked, she was learning how to keep a newborn alive. She now has three children, aged 15, 13 and 6, and for the last 15 years motherhood has been, by her own account, the centre of her life.
The quiet erosion of a self
What makes her account worth sitting with is the precision of the diagnosis. She is not describing a neglectful household or a husband who blocked her from having a life. Her husband coached their son’s football and soccer teams, volunteered with a church band and played golf with friends. Her children had sports, friendships and their own growing lives. She had, as she puts it with deliberate understatement, laundry. And dishes.
When she told her husband she was frustrated, he encouraged her to try new things. The family wanted her to be happy. The problem, she writes, was ‘quieter than that.’ No one had taken her identity from her. She had simply, over years, moved herself to the end of the line. That framing, the absence of a villain, is precisely what makes the pattern she describes so recognisable and so difficult to name in real time.
The turning point was a birthday trip on which she went hiking. She had expected to tolerate it, maybe to enjoy the view. Instead she felt, in her own word, ‘awake.’ She discovered she liked being outside, liked feeling capable in a way that had nothing to do with being needed. When she returned home, that experience became a question: if she could still discover that she loved hiking, what else had she never given herself the chance to try?
Rediscovering identity after motherhood, one project at a time
The answer became a list. Clay magnets, decorated planters, a vegetable garden, baked bread, peach cobbler, a book club, cyanotype photography, embroidered pictures of her dogs, a hemmed dress, a sewn toddler skirt. Some projects made her feel proud; some made her feel ridiculous; one left her yard covered in soggy paper pulp after she knocked over the bucket she had spent nearly two hours filling.
Embroidery has been her favourite so far, and also one of the most complicated: software, machine, thread, stabiliser, files, and what she describes as a tangled mess that made her think, ‘This is why people buy things from stores.’ The difficulty, she suggests, was part of the value. Learning to tolerate failure in front of yourself is a different skill from tolerating it in front of your children, though she argues both matter: she wants her kids to see her try things she is bad at, to see her laugh when something flops.
The deeper discomfort she names is around permission. As a mother who works from home, she was accustomed to measuring time by its usefulness. Spending an afternoon making paper she did not need felt, she writes, ‘almost suspicious, like someone was going to walk outside and ask to see a permit for joy.’ That phrase, ‘a permit for joy’, captures something precise about the specific tax that constant availability levies on a person’s sense of entitlement to their own time.
She is clear that she does not regret becoming a mother young, nor regret building her life around her family. What she is learning, she writes, is that ‘taking up space does not make me less devoted to my family. It just reminds me that I am part of the family, too.’ The 35-things project is still under way. Not everything on the list will stick. The paper, clearly, will not. But the project’s point was never the output; it was the act of showing up for herself, one new attempt at a time, and finding out what she had been missing.