I sold a company when I was six months pregnant. It had been an incredibly stressful period, leading a business through a major transition while I carried a baby. This pregnancy was much different. Not only because I was 40. This time, I wasn’t the same woman who had become a mother years earlier. My body was different. My life was different. There were more people depending on me and more moving pieces.
Then the baby arrived, and those first few months were a lot. Strep and COVID moved through the house. I had double mastitis, followed by an allergic reaction to the medication. There were family demands, sleepless nights, and what felt like an endless series of things that needed attention. My hands were always doing something for someone else: holding, feeding, soothing, reaching. The older boys still needed their mom. Work didn’t disappear.
I loved being a mother again. But I was also trying to figure out where I fit inside this new version of my life. I had a blended family, a marriage I loved, and a career I wasn’t ready to stop building. I had spent years rebuilding my identity, and suddenly I was being asked to expand it again. I knew how to be a mother. What I hadn’t fully anticipated was how much I would have to renegotiate being myself.
Here is what surprised me most. Not that motherhood was hard. I knew motherhood could be hard. It was realizing that even the changes you desperately want can require you to rediscover yourself. I have written a lot here about divorce, and that rupture changed me profoundly. But not every rupture begins with something terrible happening. Sometimes your life changes because something wonderful happens, and you still have to grieve the version of yourself who existed before it.
I don’t think I lost myself. I think I temporarily lost access to certain parts of myself. The woman who could make a decision and move. The woman who could take an hour for herself without first figuring out what everyone else needed. I was still that woman. I just couldn’t reach her the same way. Loving my baby and missing parts of myself were never opposites. You can be exactly where you wanted to be and still need to find yourself again.
This was not my first starting over. I have moved across the country. I have navigated divorce, business transitions, acquisitions, and becoming a blended family. And then I had another baby at 40. Some changes I chose. Some arrived before I was ready. But every single one asked me some version of the same question: Who are you when the life you knew no longer operates the way it used to?
The answer didn’t come in one big moment, and it definitely didn’t come in those first few weeks. It took months for things to settle down. Between the illnesses, my own recovery, the baby, and family responsibilities, I was operating in a constant state of responding to what everyone needed. And eventually, things started to calm down. I started getting back into work, not just managing responsibilities, but actually feeling that part of my brain come alive again. I started getting my workouts in, lifting weights, moving my body, feeling strong again.
Those things sound small, but they weren’t small to me. Sometimes it was simply having enough energy left at the end of the day to want something for myself. Working out wasn’t just about getting my body back. It was about having something that belonged to me, something that reminded me I could still make a commitment to myself and follow through. And work wasn’t just about a paycheck or a title. I’ve always loved building things and solving problems. That part of me didn’t disappear when I had another baby. She just hadn’t had much room to breathe.
I didn’t suddenly become myself again. I started making room for myself again. And when I look back across every reinvention I’ve lived, the truths underneath are the same. The identity you built may not fit the life you’re living anymore. You can love what you’re becoming and still miss what you’ve left behind. And you rarely recognize yourself all at once. You find yourself in pieces, usually while you’re busy doing something entirely ordinary. Not with a grand declaration, and not by waking up one morning completely transformed. For me it was picking up the weights again and opening my laptop with a sense of purpose, until little by little, I came back into focus.
Which brings me to the woman I am really writing to this week. She’s the woman who never got divorced, and she thinks this newsletter isn’t for her. Maybe she’s still happily married. Maybe she just had a baby and doesn’t recognize her body. Maybe her children have left for college and the house is suddenly too quiet. Maybe she lost her job, became a caregiver for a parent, or built a career she no longer wants. Nothing necessarily looks broken from the outside, but something inside her has changed, and she doesn’t know what to call it.
She’s waiting for something dramatic enough to justify starting over. A divorce. A diagnosis. A layoff. A moment that everyone else would recognize as a turning point. But sometimes the rupture is quieter than that. Not every reinvention begins with a breakdown. Some begin with a birth. Others begin with an empty bedroom, or a calendar that suddenly has nowhere you need to be. You don’t need a catastrophe to earn the right to rebuild.
So here is the smallest true thing I want you to do this week. Ask yourself one question: What part of me have I stopped making room for? Don’t turn it into a project or a 90-day plan. Just write down the answer. Maybe it’s strength. Maybe it’s creativity, friendships, solitude, ambition, or joy. Then give that part of yourself ten minutes this week, because you don’t have to reinvent your entire life to begin making room for yourself inside it.
To the woman starting over when nobody around her has noticed: I see you. I know how strange it feels to be grateful for your life and still wonder where parts of you went. To love your children, your partner, your work, and still miss something you can’t quite name. You don’t have to make a case for why this season is hard, or wait until something falls apart to admit that something has changed. And you don’t have to become the woman you were before. Maybe the next version of you gets to carry the best parts of her forward, with a little more room for the woman you are now. And I hope you stop measuring your progress by how much you can carry.
You are not lost. You are becoming MOMumental.
MOMumentally,
Erika
PS. If you want a place to put that answer, The Complete Library holds the workbooks I built for exactly these seasons. You use the page you need when you need it. It is HERE.