There is an underreported truth about the pre-baby interests that go dormant during the demanding early years of motherhood: they are not indicators of who you were. They are indicators of who you still are.
The creativity, the physicality, the curiosity, the social connection, the particular flavour of pleasure that expressed itself through painting or running or cooking or music or reading or growing things or making things or understanding things — those needs do not expire when you have children. They go underground. And the act of returning to them is not a regression to a previous self. It is a recognition that the self never went anywhere, and that what you call the return is actually the resumption of something that was always already you.
What the Research Actually Shows
According to research on maternal identity, losing yourself in motherhood is extremely common — and therapists who specialise in working with mothers note that women are often socialised to put other people's wants and needs before their own, which can be an easy pattern to continue in motherhood, with personal interests and hobbies among the first things to go quiet in the transition.
The mechanism by which interests go dormant is not, in most cases, a decision. It is a compression that happens under the weight of caregiving demands, time constraints, the cognitive occupation of the mental load, and the identity reorganization that the matrescence research describes as one of the defining features of the transition to motherhood. The mother who used to paint does not decide to stop painting. She simply has not painted in six weeks, and then twelve, and then the materials are in the spare room that is now a nursery, and the question of when she will paint again has stopped arising because the question of when she will have an uninterrupted afternoon has also stopped arising, and the two absences have become so entangled that she has quietly stopped expecting either.
Research published in Women's Health Issues argues that the transition to motherhood should be formally recognized as a critical and sensitive developmental period — one comparable in scope to adolescence, with biological, psychological, social, and existential dimensions that reshape identity at its core. The connection is not complicated: the interests that sustained you before children were not incidental to who you were. They were expressions of who you were. Losing them is not a neutral logistical adjustment. It is a reduction in the dimensions of selfhood available to you, and that reduction has costs that compound quietly across the years of their absence.
It Is Not the Activity. It Is What the Activity Does.
The most important reframe available for mothers trying to find their way back to the things they loved before children is this: the goal is not to replicate the pre-baby version of the activity. The goal is to identify the underlying need that the activity was serving and to find a version of meeting that need that fits the life you are actually living now.
This reframe matters because the direct replication of pre-baby activities is often genuinely impossible in the early parenting years — and when mothers measure themselves against that impossibility, they tend to conclude that the interest itself is unavailable rather than that the specific form of it is unavailable. The distinction is significant.
The mother who used to run marathons is probably not going to train for a marathon with an infant and a partner who travels for work. But the need that marathon training was serving — the physical challenge, the hour of solitude, the specific satisfaction of measurable improvement over time, the meditative quality of sustained effort — those needs have not expired. They can be met in a 25-minute morning run before the household wakes up. They can be met in a strength training practice during nap time. They can be met in a Saturday morning class that she has decided is non-negotiable rather than aspirational. The need is portable even when the original form is not.
Dr. Aurélie Athan, whose work at Teachers College, Columbia University revived the concept of matrescence for modern audiences, describes the integration work of the maternal transition as one of expansion rather than return. What tends to come back, when the conditions are created for it, is the underlying quality — the curiosity, the pleasure in making, the need for physical challenge, the appetite for sustained intellectual engagement — in whatever form fits the current life.
The Permission Problem and How to Solve It
Research on maternal identity recovery consistently identifies the permission problem as the primary barrier between mothers and the things they loved before children. Not time, though time is genuinely constrained. Not logistics, though logistics are genuinely complicated. The internalized belief that spending time on something that serves only yourself is a selfishness that the demands of motherhood have placed indefinitely on hold.
This belief is pervasive and it is incorrect in ways that the evidence is unambiguous about. Research published in Frontiers in Psychology found that maternal wellbeing is critical not only to child development and wellbeing but also to high-quality parenting — with mothers who scored high in distress being less engaged in shared play and learning activities with their children, while high levels of maternal wellbeing form the basis for more positive and present parenting.
The children of mothers who maintain individual identities and individual interests outside of their maternal role do not suffer for it. They benefit from it. The modelling of individual personhood — the idea that adults have interests and inner lives that are not organized entirely around the needs of others — is one of the more valuable things a parent can show a child. And the mother herself is, by every available measure of wellbeing, better for it.
The permission does not come from outside. It is not awarded at the conclusion of a sufficient period of selflessness. It is a decision that the mother makes about her own life, on behalf of her own wellbeing and the wellbeing of the family she is sustaining. She decides that the thing she loves is not a reward to be earned. It is a condition of her sustainability as a person — which is the condition of her sustainability as a mother.
The Smallest Possible Version of the Thing You Miss
The practical guidance from therapists and researchers who work with mothers on identity recovery is consistent and specific: start with the smallest possible version of the thing you miss. Not the ambitious version, not the full version, not the version you had before children. The version that is actually possible right now.
This is not a consolation prize. It is a strategic starting point. The smallest possible version of the thing you love is the version that can be sustained within the actual constraints of the current life, and the version that is sustained is infinitely more valuable than the version that is theorized and never begun.
For the mother who used to paint, the smallest possible version might be a sketchbook kept on the nightstand and fifteen minutes most evenings after the children are down. Not the studio practice. Not the oil paintings that required an afternoon. The sketchbook. The fifteen minutes. The commitment to showing up for a small, protected piece of the day that belongs only to the creative impulse.
For the mother who used to cook seriously, the smallest possible version might be one new recipe per week — on the weeknight when the partner is handling bedtime — that gets to be interesting and exploratory rather than simply functional.
For the mother who used to run, it might be a 6 a.m. alarm three days a week, before the day has made its claims on her, when she is still the person who runs before she has become the person who manages everything else.
A 2025 pilot study evaluating a matrescence-informed education program for new mothers found that participants who developed a deeper understanding of the identity shifts involved in the transition to motherhood reported gains in self-compassion, personal strength, and relationships — suggesting that simply naming and understanding the experience produces measurable benefit even before the external circumstances change.
The Interests as Diagnostic Information
Your pre-baby interests are not only things to return to. They are diagnostic information about who you are that remains accurate regardless of how many years have elapsed since you last acted on them.
The woman who used to paint and has not painted in three years still needs what painting gave her. The woman who used to run and has not run in two years still needs what running gave her. The question is not "can I get back to the thing?" The question is "what did the thing give me, and how am I getting that now, and if I am not getting it, what is the cost of the absence?"
The absence always has a cost. Research on maternal identity consistently finds that when maternal and societal expectations outpace a woman's sense of individual identity, the result is often a feeling of losing oneself or disappearing into the role — an experience linked to increased rates of anxiety, depression, and emotional exhaustion. The cost is sometimes visible, in the form of diminished wellbeing, increased irritability, a sense of flatness or groundlessness or loss of forward motion. Sometimes it is less visible, embedded in a chronic low-level dissatisfaction that has become the background hum of a life that is good in many ways but is missing something it cannot name.
The pre-baby interests name it. They are the map of the interior self that you built before motherhood changed everything, and the map is still accurate. The things that used to sustain you still know how to sustain you. They are waiting, in the same spot where you left them, for you to decide that you have permission to go looking.
What Happens When You Go Back
The research on identity recovery in mothers is consistent about what the return actually looks like — and it is considerably less cinematic than the cultural imagination of it. It is not a pivot. It is not a single morning when everything feels different. It is a series of very small choices, made slowly, without fanfare, that accumulate into something that matters.
She picks up the book. Eighteen months later she has read 94 of them and built a community of readers around a voice that turns out to be exactly as distinctive as it has always been. The voice was never gone. It was waiting.
She was always allowed. The interest was always there. The wanting was always legitimate. The only thing that needed to change was her relationship to the permission, and the permission was hers to give all along.
For mothers navigating the return, Postpartum Support International's peer support groups include community specifically designed for the identity dimensions of the maternal transition.
The things you loved before the baby are not gone. They have been waiting in the same spot where you left them. Perhaps in a slightly different form. Perhaps quieter than they used to be. But unmistakably, recognisably, persistently yours.
