Motherhood didn't kill my ambition, but it rerouted me through every stage of grief.

Now in my next phase of life, I'm trying to dodge another pass through the five stages

Read this post on my blog.

I had to retrain my brain to be a parent. It took a decade because I was going through the five stages of grief. For me, the longest stage was denial, because as long as I kept working full time I didn’t have to deal with the reality of my new life.

Something I learned from Z losing his hearing in the car crash is that the five stages don’t come in a specific order. This is jarring at first because we all want to see ourselves making progress.

But once I realized that the order is variable, I went back and saw that my second stage of learning to be a parent was bargaining. I tried a million different ways to work while I was raising the kids. I told myself that I was the exception to the rule and that other people were simply not as good at working as I was. This was wrong.

Which left me in my next stage: anger. This was when I was doing all my research so I could scream at everyone about the realities of life. I researched where to live, and I realized that all that research is predicated on what makes us happy. I researched why women quit work and men don’t, and I realized it’s because most women choose to quit. The women most uncomfortable with quitting are autistic women because they’re happiest at work.

So. Much. Research. I don’t even know how it helped me, except to see that asking the question of what makes me happy was not the right starting point.

Acceptance came next. I accepted that I was choosing to take care of my children and that I couldn’t be good at work and good at parenting. I wanted to be good at something, so I chose kids. I watched my yearly earnings decrease every year for a decade. I started at about $300K. Acceptance was very expensive.

So I don’t think it’s unreasonable that I’m in the depression stage. Not technically, because I take medicine so that I can’t get too depressed. I guess it’s a theoretical depression. It’s a disorientation, like I keep thinking I’m holding a scalpel, but really it’s a spoon. And maybe that’s okay. Moms need spoons. So why do I always reframe to find what’s bad instead of what’s good?

This is supposed to be the happiest time of life: women whose kids are grown. That scares me, because maybe it’s true. Every time I thought the research didn’t apply to me, I turned out to be a data point that proved it right.

Some time ago I asked ChatGPT what we have learned about people from so many of us talking to AI. The answer was that we are all worried we’re not doing enough that matters. I don’t want to live my life like that. I want to feel like what I do is enough.

So I guess the grief I experienced from losing my work self to become a mom was actually the grief we are talking to ChatGPT about at all stages of life: we don’t know what “enough” feels like.

I am sitting across from Nino right now. He is reading and I am writing. Then we will walk the dog through the harbor. Then we will go to a hip hop open mic. I don’t think I could ask for a more perfect day. So maybe this is the best time of my life, and maybe I am in the acceptance stage. I just don’t know what it looks like.