Being called home: an essay on self and matrescence
By Roxanna - New Perspectives Coaching
Nobody warned me that becoming a mother would be the most disorienting and the most clarifying thing that would ever happen to me - and that both would be true at the same time.
I thought I was losing myself. I didn’t realise I was being called home.
There is a particular kind of tired that comes for you quietly. It’s not the tiredness of broken sleep or long days - it’s deeper than that. It’s also the tiredness of performing. Of shrinking. Of explaining yourself to people who were never really listening. Of carrying relationships that only ever seemed to flow one way. Motherhood didn’t create that exhaustion. It just made it impossible to ignore anymore.
When you become responsible for a small person’s entire world, something shifts. You stop having the bandwidth for people who drain you. Not out of bitterness - out of necessity. There is simply no energy left for takers. And for the first time, you don’t feel guilty about that. You feel clear (even if slightly delirious from sleep deprivation).
Womanhood spirals. It keeps bringing you back to the same place, but each time you’re standing there as a truer version of who you’ve always been. It's scary and exhilarating all at once. The woman I was before her - driven, achieving, performing - she wasn’t wrong. She was just a long way from home. She was still making excuses for people who never deserved them. Still contorting herself to keep the peace. Still confusing loyalty with self-abandonment. And often, she was doing not for herself, but for convention.
My daughter needed me to be present. And in learning to be present for her, I found my way back to me, in this chapter of my life.
And here’s what I’ve come to understand about presence - really being present. It’s a gift. Not just to my girl, but to myself. Because my life is not separate from hers. It’s an example. It’s the living, breathing thing she will look at and learn from before she ever fully reads a book or hears a lecture or has her own reckoning with who she is. She is watching me. And I want what she sees to mean something.
Motherhood is part of womanhood. It just is. Whether you birth children, adopt children, love children or are a mother to yourself (yes, you don't need to be called a mother in the conventional sense to be a mother - the first child we should all take care of is the one within). And yes, there is sacrifice - real sacrifice - and rightly so. If you don’t want to sacrifice, don’t have children (and/or don't go on a journey on self mastery to revive the child within you). I mean that with full love and zero judgement. But sacrifice cannot be the whole story. There has to be a larger space - when the time is right, when the rhythm allows - to be filled as a person. To drive the gears of your own life again. Happy mother, happy child (and/or inner child). That’s not a cliché. That’s just the truth.
Because when the intention behind your actions is clear, when it comes from a real place, not performance, not guilt, not the need to be seen, the example you set becomes the biggest gift you could ever give your child. That’s your chance. To show her how you love your values. How you honour your truth. How you live from your essence rather than your fear. And won’t you want her to see that? Of course you will. I know I do.
That’s shared pride. Shared experience. A reinforcement of something healthy and deep - the kind of attachment that doesn’t hold each other back but expands as you both grow. As you try to expand your lives together. My daughter sees me build. She sees me question. She sees me come back to myself, again and again (even if it's messy and emotional). And I hope that one day, when she has her own moment of reckoning - and she will - she remembers that her mother did it too. And that it was worth it.
I started writing because I needed somewhere to put all of it. The mess, the grief, the beauty, the slow and quiet anger of realising how much of myself I had given away. The questions I didn’t have answers to yet. The page became the place I came home to when everything else felt uncertain. Writing didn’t fix anything. But it told the truth. And the truth, it turns out, is where home lives.
The mental tiredness - the kind that is rarely spoken about with depth and compassion - is the tiredness of being everything to everyone while quietly disappearing. It’s the tiredness of knowing, somewhere deep down, that something isn’t right, but not yet having the language for it. Motherhood gave me that language. Or, if I'm honest with myself, it made me brave enough to use it.
Some nights I lie next to my girl in the dark and think: I am exactly where I’m supposed to be. Not because life is perfect. Because I’m finally honest about what it is. Motherhood cracked me open in places I’d spent years keeping sealed. That’s not a wound. That’s a door. And yes, the threshold might feel uncomfortable to cross, but going back is no longer an option. Going back feels impossible compared with crossing over.
Coming home to yourself isn’t a moment. It’s a choice you make, quietly, again and again - in the thinking, in the stillness, in the decision to stop pretending you’re fine when you’re not. In the moment you finally stop explaining yourself to people who were never going to understand you anyway and start questioning inwards. And what I’ve learned is that the coming home never really ends. Life keeps moving, keeps shifting and keeps asking you to show up differently. The gift isn’t arriving. The gift is learning how to realign - in real time, in the middle of the mess - so that wherever you are, you are still yourself. Alignment is only constant if it's flexible - that's what most people fail to miss. That’s the perspective shift that changes everything. Not a one-time breakthrough. A practice. A quiet, daily return to who you actually are at that moment.
