The hardest thing to admit about Motherhood

"An honest reflection on the hidden risks of self-abandonment in motherhood — and how reclaiming my body, my worth, and my inner life has given me more to offer, not less."

Over the years, I have shared different stories about my eating disorder, my recovery, and my ongoing journey toward making peace with my body. As any true journey goes, there are twists and turns, ebbs and flows and, hopefully, over time, new insight and understanding become available.

The basics of my story are this: since the age of sixteen, I struggled with an eating disorder and deep body insecurity. My diagnosis was Bulimia Nervosa, though at another time, I’ll share more about how specific diagnoses often funnel into the same underlying experience: restriction, control, and disconnection from the body, regardless of behavior. What matters for today is that I had an incredibly disordered relationship with food, with the role my body played in my self-worth, and therefore engaged in harmful behaviors.

I went to outpatient treatment in high school. As I moved through college and into my twenties and early thirties, I portrayed my eating disorder as something behind me. Except, it wasn’t. Disordered eating and distorted beliefs about my body stayed with me, simmering just beneath the surface.

When I became pregnant with my daughter, something shifted. My eating disorder behaviors paused. And when they tried to revive themselves postpartum, I realized for the first time that I truly no longer wanted to live in my body that way. Much of that motivation came from becoming a mother to a daughter I loved more than life itself. A wiser part of me knew that if I didn't face this, the risk of passing it down to her would multiply exponentially.

So, I began to stop.
And I began to work on the reasons why my disorder existed in the first place.

Anyone who has ever struggled with disordered behaviors or addiction knows: while it is about the food in some ways, it’s so much more about everything else. I won’t go into all of my reasons today, but I will share this: much of my healing centered around self-worth. Around the belief systems I had internalized about who I was, and whether I was "good enough."
Good enough for what, you might ask?

Anything. Everything.

I moved through life constantly trying to prove myself, good enough for the job I held, good enough for my marriage, good enough for the choices I made (leaving theater, living in New York City, being seen online), and of course, good enough in body and beauty by external standards.
Strangely—and gratefully—the one area where I didn’t fight this internal war was in motherhood. Becoming a mother offered me, for the first time, a sense of unconditional belonging and purpose.

That's where it started for me, anyway.

I was able to embody motherhood and the love between my daughter and me in a way I hadn’t yet experienced elsewhere. I am endlessly grateful for this gift. And yet, even as I say that, I recognize: it’s an enormous and unfair burden to place on a child.
She is not responsible for my healing.
She is not responsible for my emotional self-worth.
Her work, as she grows, will be to figure out her own self-worth. My work was, and is, to integrate my healing into my own existence, separate from her.

Motherhood is epically beautiful. It stretches you in body, mind, and spirit in ways you never knew possible. But as the years passed, I began to hear a voice inside me warning: Motherhood can become an alluring form of self-abandonment.
Not the abandonment of our children, but the abandonment of ourselves.
How often do we step into this role, consumed by a love so fierce and intoxicating, that we willingly erase ourselves?

I began to wonder: Is it possible to love this much outside of myself, to fall head over heels for my child, and not lose myself entirely?
Because one day, she will leave, just as she’s supposed to.
And if I have poured everything into her and nothing into myself, what will be left?

As selfish as I want to be about what my daughter means to me, I know that I cannot and should not be the center of her life. It is not a reciprocal relationship. Nor should it be.

If I spend these formative years pouring everything into her but neglecting myself, the battleground I left behind will remain barren ground, unhealed, unfarmed, wasted.

At the start of this, I said that journeys bring new insight.
This is my new insight:

The reason I stopped battling my body was not only to break the cycle for my daughter.
It was to reclaim my own earth. And it has to be this way, otherwise, we both lose.

The body I once raged against is fertile land.
I want to turn that land into something magnificent, not for her, not for my husband, but for me.
Before I leave this life, I want to know what it feels like to live fully in my own skin, to experience the wild beauty, growth, and abundance that have always been mine to tend.

For too long, I neglected the soil, or worse, tore it apart, questioning its inherent richness.

I am still a work in progress.
I no longer battle my body, but I don’t yet walk through a lush, perfectly tended Eden either.
Still, there is growth.
There is potential I can see now.

While my daughter continues to inspire me every day, I am working to ensure that my healing does not rely solely on her existence. Yes, it matters that she has a mother who is no longer at war with herself.
But she also deserves a mother who has not made her responsible for filling the places I neglected to tend.

It feels almost controversial to admit: for centuries, mothers have been quietly expected to sacrifice every ounce of themselves for their children. It’s a dynamic deeply convenient to patriarchal systems, lose yourself in service, and we’ll "find" you again through roles, approval, validation.

I don’t want to be found by someone else.
I want to find me.

And while being seen by others matters to some degree, imagine the power of being seen first and foremost by ourselves and having that be enough.

This is my journey to embodiment: the one I have been on, and the one I am still moving through.
It isn’t perfect.
I don’t have all the answers.

But I am determined to build a home within myself one that houses my love for my child, my husband, my family and friends but also, at its very core, holds my love for me.

First and foremost.
Above all else.

Why does it feel so bold to claim that?

Maybe because it is.