When did you last do something that was entirely, unapologetically yours?

When did you last do something that was entirely, unapologetically yours, with no justification required and no one else's needs folded in?

For a lot of parents, especially mothers, the honest answer is: a long time ago. And even now, reading that question, something in you is already rationalising why that is fine. You chose this. You love your children. You are not complaining. Other people have it harder.

That is not the question. The question is not whether you love them or whether you are grateful. The question is whether you still exist as a person apart from the role, and what happens to everyone in the house when the answer is no.

The identity shrink nobody talks about

There is a well-documented pattern in new parenthood called the identity disruption. Research from the University of Michigan found that most parents, but disproportionately mothers, experience what psychologists call a contraction of the self in the first years of parenting. The person you were before, with interests, opinions, ambitions, and a recognisable inner life, shrinks to make room for the role.

In the early years, this is partly biological and partly practical. The baby needs what the baby needs, and everything else waits. That is appropriate and temporary. What the research also shows is that for a significant proportion of parents, especially those without strong support networks or who returned to high-demand work quickly, the self never fully re-expands. The contraction becomes permanent.

You can be ten years into parenting and still living inside a version of yourself that shrank in the first year and never grew back.

Why giving everything is not the same as giving well

There is a persistent cultural story that the best parent is the most selfless one. That keeping something for yourself is a kind of taking from your child. That your needs and their needs are in competition, and good parenting means theirs win.

This is not supported by the evidence, and it is genuinely harmful.

A parent who has nothing left for themselves does not actually have more to give. They have less. What a depleted person gives their child is not full presence. It is managed absence.

Children are also watching. They are watching what you model about what an adult's life looks like. They are watching whether the people who love them make time for things that matter to them. They are watching whether you treat your own needs as legitimate. That watching becomes their baseline assumption about what a life looks like, and what they are allowed to want from theirs.

What Still Me is built around

Still Me is a workbook for parents who have lost track of who they are outside the role. Not parents who are struggling, necessarily. Just parents who, if asked the question from the opening of this article, would not know how to answer it.

The workbook works through five areas. The first is identity: who were you before, what has stayed, what has been left behind, and what was left behind by choice versus what drifted away without a decision. The second is energy: where yours is going now, and whether the distribution is one you chose or one you fell into. The third is your needs, actual needs, the ones you have been explaining away as wants or luxuries. The fourth is permission, because for most people the barrier is not practical but psychological. And the fifth is forward: what does a version of your life look like where you are still in it as a person, not just as a function?

The guilt question

It comes up every time: but won't my children feel like they are not my priority?

Children need parents who are present, regulated, and whole. A parent who has maintained their own identity, who has things they care about, who shows up to the family as a person and not just a role, gives their children something that a depleted, self-erased parent cannot. They give them a model of a complete human life. They give them a parent who is actually there, not one who is physically present but emotionally hollowed out.

Claiming yourself back is not a betrayal of your children. It is part of what they need from you.

A small place to start

If the question at the top of this article brought up grief or blankness, that is important information. It means there is someone in there who has not had enough room, and who has been waiting.

You do not have to do this all at once. The workbook starts with one question: who were you before the role began, and what did that person love? Not what they were good at. Not what was practical. What they loved, purely for its own sake.

That person is still in there. Still Me is the work of finding yourself again.