How to Feel Like Yourself Again Before You Feel Like a Lover

A letter from Maren.

Before I could want Beckett again, I had to find myself again. That sounds like a greeting card. It is not. It was the hardest, loneliest work I have ever done inside a marriage.

After our third child, I looked in the mirror and did not recognize the woman looking back. Not because of the weight or the stretch marks or the dark circles. Because the woman in the mirror did not seem to belong to herself. She belonged to the baby. To the toddler. To the five-year-old. To the husband. To the house. To the schedule. She was everyone's mother and no one's person. Including her own.

I could not be a lover because I had forgotten how to be a self.

The Disappearing Act No One Warns You About

Motherhood is a beautiful disappearing act. You pour yourself into these small people and the pouring feels holy and right and necessary. But somewhere between the first feeding and the five-hundredth bedtime, you realize you have poured out everything and refilled nothing.

Your body becomes functional. It feeds, carries, comforts, cleans. It stops being something you inhabit for pleasure and becomes something you operate for output. And when your partner reaches for that body at the end of the day, you think: That body is not available right now. It is in service mode. Please try again later.

This is not a sex problem. This is an identity problem. And no amount of date nights or new lingerie will fix an identity problem.

What Fixed It for Me

I wish I could tell you there was a single moment. There wasn't. It was a series of small reclamations:

I started locking the bathroom door. Not for five minutes. For thirty. I took baths that were not efficient. I used products that smelled good for no reason other than they smelled good. I touched my own skin without purpose. Not sexually. Just. Noticing. Oh. I'm still in here.

I bought something for myself that had nothing to do with the family. A journal. A body oil that was mine, not ours. A book that was not about parenting. Small things that said: you are a person with preferences, not just a person with responsibilities.

I stopped waiting to feel like myself before doing things for myself. I had been thinking: When I feel like me again, I'll start taking care of myself. I had it backwards. Taking care of myself is how I started feeling like me again.

I told Beckett what I needed, even when it sounded selfish. "I need Saturday mornings alone." "I need you to not touch me for a few days so I can miss being touched." "I need to feel like a person before I can feel like your wife." He heard me. It wasn't easy for him. But he heard me.

And Then

Slowly. Over weeks that felt like months. I started to come back. Not the twenty-three-year-old version of me. A different version. One who knew what she needed and was not ashamed to ask for it. One who could look in the mirror and see someone she recognized.

And from that place. From the place of being a self again. Desire returned. Not as a performance. Not as a duty. As a want. My want. For the first time in years, I wanted something for myself. And what I wanted was him.

But I had to find me first.

- Maren