Becoming a parent changed my life in ways I’d expected—and in many ways I didn’t.
I expected sleepless nights, endless diaper changes, and the happiness that comes with seeing my baby smile and laugh.
What I didn’t expect was that becoming a parent would bring my childhood wounds to the surface.
The loneliness I felt as a new mother began to remind me of a loneliness I’d felt long before I became one.
Becoming a mother wasn’t just the beginning of my son’s story.
It was also the beginning of understanding my own.
The Dream of Becoming a Mother and Building a Happy Family
I always wanted to have children.
When I became pregnant, I was very excited and couldn’t wait to meet my son. More than anything, I looked forward to building a family of my own.
What I didn’t expect was the wave of emotions and sadness that followed after he was born.
After twenty hours of labour and an emergency C-section, I came home physically exhausted and overwhelmed. There was pressure to breastfeed, produce enough milk, recover from surgery, and somehow know how to care for this tiny human.
I kept asking myself,
Why does this feel so much harder than I expected?
Of course, caring for a newborn is exhausting.
I tried to tell my parents how tired and overwhelmed I felt. Instead of being met with empathy, I was simply told, “This is what being a mother is like.”
I felt incredibly alone.
As I held my son, I wondered if I had been held.
As I breastfed my son, I wondered if I had been breastfed.
As my love for him grew larger, I wondered if my parents had felt the same about me.
I didn’t know the answers to those questions.
What I did know was that I felt an emptiness I couldn’t explain.
Then one day, something clicked.
I realized I had felt emotionally lonely as a child.
And now, I felt emotionally alone on my journey as a mother.
Becoming Curious
For months, I couldn’t stop thinking about those questions.
Was I held?
Did someone comfort me the way I instinctively wanted to comfort my son?
Why did becoming a mother feel so incredibly lonely?
The more curious I became, the more I realized that my exhaustion wasn’t only physical.
I wasn’t only recovering from childbirth.
I was grieving a childhood I hadn’t fully understood until I became a parent myself.
For years, I believed I was simply independent.
Now I began to wonder if I had simply learned to do everything alone—because I had to.
This led me to read about attachment theory and child development. When I came across Dr. Lindsay C. Gibson’s Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, pieces of my life slowly began to make sense.
I began to understand that growing up with emotionally immature parents hadn’t only affected my childhood. It was shaping how I experienced motherhood—how easily I put my own needs aside and how deeply I felt the absence of emotional care.
The Unexpected Gift of Parenthood
Becoming a mother didn’t just change my future.
It changed the way I understood my past.
Every time I comfort my son when he’s upset…
Every time I hold him while he cries…
I’m reminded of what every child longs for—to feel seen and emotionally safe.
I’m trying to give those things to my son. And in the process, I’m learning how to give them to myself.
If becoming a parent has stirred up emotions or memories you weren’t expecting, I hope you know you’re not alone.
Our childhood may shape us, but it doesn’t have to define us.