You can love your child and still miss yourself

Here’s something nobody puts on the baby shower card: you can feel overwhelming love and real grief in the same afternoon. Sometimes in the same five minutes.

You can be deeply grateful for your baby and still mourn the parts of yourself that seem to have gone missing. Maybe you miss being spontaneous. Feeling at home in your own body. Having a conversation with your partner that isn’t a status update on who slept, who ate, and whose turn it is.

And then someone finally takes the baby for an hour, and you stand in the kitchen realizing you have no idea what you even want to do with it.

You don’t have to enjoy every minute to love being their mom.

The world tells mothers to be happy, soft, and endlessly nurturing. But motherhood can also be incredibly lonely. Your body becomes someone else’s comfort and food source. Your time stops being yours. Your needs slide to the bottom of the list, and your sense of who you are starts shifting in ways you might not have words for yet.

Here, you can say the whole thing. Including the part you usually follow with, “But of course I love my baby.”

We know. We believe you.

Pregnancy and postpartum therapy for the parts no one warned you about

There’s endless advice about preparing for a baby. Car seats, sleep schedules, which bottle won’t leak. There’s a lot less about what it actually feels like to become someone’s mother.

You might have the registry fully handled and still feel unprepared for the changes in your body, your relationship, or the way you see yourself. You might want this pregnancy and still feel scared. You might be heading toward birth with a history that makes feeling safe in a hospital, or in your own body, especially complicated.

Then the baby arrives, and everyone wants to know how the baby is doing.

We want to know how you’re doing.

Maybe the birth keeps replaying in your mind. Feeding hasn’t gone the way you hoped. You feel sad, irritable, numb, or disconnected. You can’t switch off, even when someone else is on baby duty. Or your anxiety is so loud that you can’t let anyone else take over at all. Your baby’s cry might hit your nervous system like a fire alarm, leaving you wired, overstimulated, and on edge.

You might also be having scary, unwanted thoughts that pop into your head and won’t leave. These intrusive thoughts are far more common in new parents than most people realize, and you can talk about them here without being judged.

Postpartum therapy gives you a place to bring all of it, without needing to organize it into a neat explanation first. We support moms through postpartum depression, postpartum anxiety, birth trauma, and the big identity shift that comes with new motherhood (sometimes called matrescence).

For birth trauma, we may use approaches like EMDR or Brainspotting to help your body and brain process what happened, so it stops feeling like it’s still happening.

The mental load doesn’t clock out at bedtime

You know the diapers are running low. You know which appointment still needs scheduling, what goes in tomorrow’s daycare bag, and that the pediatrician’s office closes early on Fridays. You might even be the one explaining what needs doing when someone offers to help.

That’s a lot to carry, especially on four hours of broken sleep and a coffee you reheated three times.

Our perinatal therapist focuses on supporting moms of babies, toddlers, and kids through age five. Together, we can work on:

• Feeling touched out, overstimulated, or like there’s nothing left in the tank

• Guilt about working, resting, or wanting something that’s just yours

• Resentment about the mental load and how responsibilities are (or aren’t) shared

• Changes in intimacy, and feeling more like coworkers than partners

• Boundaries with family members who have a lot of opinions

• Going back to work and figuring out what ambition looks like now

• Staying steady through your own big feelings when your child is having theirs

You can want to do things differently and still need help figuring out how. That’s something we can work on together.

Sometimes parenting brings you face-to-face with your own childhood

For a lot of us, the way we learned to parent came from our own pain. So suddenly you’re not just learning to care for a tiny new human. You’re also running into the parts of your own story that still need care.

Maybe you hear yourself say something you swore you’d never say. Maybe your child’s meltdown feels almost impossible to sit through. Or you rock your child to sleep and catch yourself wondering why no one did that for you.

There can be grief in realizing how much you needed back then. And there can be enormous pressure to get everything right now.

In so many ways, we’re becoming mothers while learning how to mother ourselves.

In therapy, we slow those moments down and get curious about what they’re stirring up. Together, we’ll look at the patterns you learned and practice the responses you actually want to build. You deserve some patience in that process too.