When I Became More Mom Than Me

I was 19 years old and in my second year of college when I became pregnant with my first child.

Before motherhood, I had a plan for my life. In fact, I had had one since high school. I was going to work in a bank, work my way up to becoming a bank manager, and eventually have a business of my own on the side. At the time, I was working at my mom's beauty supply store and salon, and I always knew that one day I would take over. I was ambitious, goal-oriented, and certain, perhaps too certain, that I knew where my life was headed.

Then I became pregnant, and suddenly the future I had mapped out no longer felt like a straight road.

I graduated from college heavily pregnant. I remember feeling incredibly proud of myself because I had finished what I started. But once graduation was over, I didn't really have much time to sit down and ask myself what I wanted my life to look like now.

Enter my West African upbringing.

There wasn't exactly a take some time, find yourself and figure out what makes you happy conversation happening. It was more along the lines of: Go and finish school. So, I went and finished school.

I enrolled in university, put my daughter in daycare and kept going. I didn't even choose the program I truly wanted to study. At the time, getting into a prominent university felt more important. I wanted my family to be proud of me, and if I'm being completely honest, I think I was also trying to redeem myself because I hadn't just become a mother young. I had become pregnant at 19 and out of wedlock. Yikes.

Somewhere along the way, achievement became my way of proving that I was still going to be okay. See? I got pregnant young, but I'm still in university. I'm still going to get my degree. I'm still doing something with my life.

I did apply for jobs at banks, hoping I could still follow the plan I had imagined for myself in high school, but I never managed to get in. Eventually, my mom closed her beauty supply store and salon, and I decided to open a business of my own. Which by the way I closed. To finish school.

At the time, I would have called all of this ambition, and some of it absolutely was. I've always been someone with ideas, dreams and a desire to build something. Looking back now, though, I can also see something else. I had become deeply attached to productivity and to the appearance of doing something with my life. I wasn't only trying to succeed. In many ways, I was trying to prove something.

Then I became pregnant again, and once again the goal became simple: just make it through school and get the degree. I did get it, but I didn't do particularly well. By that point, I wasn't thinking much about the ambitious 19-year-old who had once mapped out exactly what she wanted her career to look like. I was trying to finish, trying to mother and trying to keep moving.

After university, life became a series of jobs and ideas. I worked, started businesses, spent time in real estate, went back to school and tried different courses. I pursued one idea and then another. I was always doing something, but I don't know that I ever stopped long enough to ask myself a much simpler question: Who am I when I'm not trying to prove that I'm doing something?

And perhaps an even harder one:

Who am I outside of being somebody's mother?

Get back to myself...but which self? Who am I going back to?

I'm 40 now, approaching 41 with what feels like alarming speed, freshly postpartum with my seventh child. I became a mother at 19, which means I've spent essentially my entire adult life mothering someone. I think that's part of why this conversation about identity has been more complicated for me than I expected.

We sometimes tell mothers who feel like they've lost themselves that they need to “get back to themselves.” But get back to who? The last version of me who existed before motherhood was a teenager.

I'm not trying to find 19-year-old Jemima again. She had dreams, plans and qualities that are still part of me, but honestly, she was also reckless and infamously made bad choices. I have lived an entire life since then. Motherhood, marriage, faith, disappointment, success, failure, grief, healing and simply growing up have changed me. There isn't some fully formed adult version of myself from before motherhood waiting for me to come back and collect her.

I became a woman while I was becoming a mother

In many ways, motherhood and I grew up together, and perhaps that's why separating the two has felt almost impossible. For more than two decades, someone has needed me. There has always been a child to feed, somewhere to drive, something to remember, somebody's problem to solve or another responsibility waiting. Being needed became normal, and if I'm completely honest, sometimes being needed is easier than figuring out what I need.

It's almost easier to fall back into the familiar story: Well, I'm a mother. I have children. This is just the season where I sacrifice what I want. There is truth in sacrifice. Motherhood requires plenty of it. But sometimes sacrifice can also become a very convenient hiding place.

If motherhood is always the reason I can't pursue something, I never have to find out whether I'm afraid to pursue it. If everyone else's needs always come first, I never have to decide what mine actually are. And if I stay busy enough taking care of everybody else, I never have to answer the question I've spent years avoiding: Who is Jemima?

Forty made me ask different questions

Something shifted when I turned 40. For the first time, I started thinking less about what I was supposed to be doing next and more about what I wanted the rest of my life to look like. Strangely enough, that question brought me right back to my children.

Who will they remember me as?

Of course, I hope they'll remember that their mother loved them fiercely, that I showed up, nurtured them, prayed for them, fought for them and did everything I knew how to do for them. But I also want them to remember a woman who knew herself.

I want my children to know that loving and serving other people doesn't require disappearing. I want them to know who God created them to be, to develop their gifts and to have the courage to pursue what God places inside of them. And eventually I had to confront an uncomfortable question:

How can I teach my children to know themselves if I'm afraid to know myself?

So I asked God

Eventually, I did what I probably should have done much sooner: I asked God, Who am I?

I'll admit that I was hoping for something profound, maybe something very specific. Some beautiful divine revelation that would suddenly connect all the scattered pieces of my life and make me say, Ahhh. THAT'S who I am.

Instead, the answer I received was Mother.

I laughed, and then, honestly, I felt discouraged. Mother? God, respectfully, I know. I have seven children. This particular revelation did not feel like breaking news.

I was trying to understand who I was beyond the role that had consumed virtually my entire adult life, and here I was being pointed right back to it. But I kept inquiring, and slowly I began to understand that perhaps I had been hearing “Mother” too narrowly. I heard a title, but God was showing me something deeper.

Motherhood wasn't simply about the children I had given birth to. It had developed something in me: the instinct to nurture, encourage, teach, cover and create space for growth. It had taught me to care deeply about women, children and families, to share what I've learned and to sit with another woman and say, I've been there too.

Perhaps the biggest revelation for this particular season has been realizing that some of that mothering needs to be extended toward me. I know how to nurture my children, but am I willing to nurture the woman God created me to be? I know how to make room for their gifts, but can I make room for mine? I know how to encourage them when they're uncertain, but can I offer myself that same grace while I'm figuring things out?

Maybe discovering who I am isn't about escaping motherhood at all. Maybe it's about finally understanding what God meant when He called me Mother without allowing the title to erase everything else He placed inside of me.

Mother, but also me

There's something I've noticed about the way we talk about the harder parts of motherhood. We often begin with a disclaimer: I love being a mother. My children are such a blessing. I wouldn't trade them for anything. And then comes the but.

But sometimes I miss myself. But sometimes I feel overwhelmed. But I don't know who I am anymore.

I've done it too. It's almost as though we need to establish that we're good mothers before we're allowed to admit that motherhood can be complicated. We rush to reassure everyone that we love our children before saying anything that might sound remotely ungrateful.

And for the record, yes, I love my children and yes, they are blessings. But maybe that doesn't need to be the precursor to every honest conversation about motherhood. Maybe both things can simply be true.

I can love being a mother and still acknowledge that I've struggled with my identity inside of motherhood. I can be grateful for my children and still admit that caring for them has sometimes left very little room for caring for myself. I can believe motherhood is part of my calling and still wonder what else God has placed inside of me. I can sacrifice for my children without believing that disappearing is the measure of a good mother.

One truth doesn't cancel out the other.

Perhaps if we stopped requiring mothers to prove their gratitude before they're allowed to talk about their struggles, more women would feel safe enough to tell the truth.

This isn't a sad reflection about everything motherhood took from me, and it certainly isn't an argument that every mother needs a career, a business, a degree, a platform or some impressive accomplishment outside the home in order to have an identity of her own. For some women, ambition and achievement are genuinely part of who they are. They thrive in their careers, love building things, set big goals and feel fulfilled pursuing them. I understand that because ambition has always been part of me too, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

What I'm learning is that there is a difference between pursuing something because it is genuinely connected to who you are and pursuing it because you need it to prove something about who you are. For me, those lines became blurred for a long time. The degree, the businesses, the jobs and the next idea weren't necessarily the problem. I just hadn't stopped to ask myself what was driving me.

So this isn't about doing more, and it isn't about doing less. It's about knowing yourself well enough to understand why you're doing what you're doing.

This reflection is an encouragement for mothers to get to know themselves. Know what makes you laugh and what you enjoy. Know what you believe and what you're good at. Pay attention to what God is teaching you. Know what you need and recognize when you're depleted. Remember the dreams you've buried and be willing to ask whether they're actually dead or simply waiting for another season.

And above everything else, know whose you are. Before any title I carry, I am a daughter of God, and I don't believe He created us intentionally only for us to spend our lives disconnected from the women He created us to be.

I'm still figuring out who Jemima is, and some days that journey looks a lot less profound than this blog post probably makes it sound.

Right now, for example, I'm preparing for a photoshoot while dealing with eczema flares on my face. At 40. Because apparently this is a thing we're doing now. Like...what?

I'd be lying if I said it hasn't affected my confidence. There are days when I don't particularly feel like being seen, let alone photographed. My hair isn't always done. Some days getting into the shower and brushing my teeth feels like an accomplishment. There are moments when I look at the polished version of myself I'm trying to present to the world and think, Girl, who exactly are we fooling?

But maybe that's part of what I'm learning too. Discovering myself can't only include the version of me that is put together.

It has to include this woman too: the freshly postpartum one, the tired one, the one whose skin is doing things she did not authorize, the one who doesn't always feel confident and the one who sometimes wants to retreat instead of putting herself out there.

For so many years, I felt the need to produce evidence that I was doing okay. The degree, the business, the job, the next idea, the next thing I could point to and say, See? I'm doing something. I'm learning that I don't need to produce evidence of being okay before I'm worthy of being seen.

And at the same time, I'm writing again. I'm preparing to release another book. Surprise! More to come on that. I'm allowing myself to imagine possibilities for my life that don't begin and end with what somebody else needs from me, and I'm learning to recognize the difference between doing something because I feel I have something to prove and doing something because it genuinely feels connected to who I am.

Maybe that's why returning to writing feels different.

I'm not trying to redeem the 19-year-old who got pregnant, nor am I trying to prove that the 40-year-old mother of seven is still capable of accomplishing something. I'm trying to listen to God, to myself and to what He's teaching me in this season.

And then I'm sitting here writing about it because perhaps that's part of what He meant by Mother too. Maybe nurturing doesn't always look like packing lunches, wiping noses or holding a baby. Sometimes it looks like being vulnerable enough to share what you're learning so another woman has permission to ask the same questions.

So no, I haven't completely answered the question, Who is Jemima?

But I'm finally interested in finding out. Not because I want to become someone other than Mom, but because I want my children to grow up knowing a mother who also knew herself.