Breaking free of my Motherhood Self Slump

I heard all about it. How motherhood will suck out your identity.

“Your life will change.”

“Your child will take over everything.”

“Be prepared to forget who you are.”

“It will be the hardest thing you’ll ever do.”

“Oh! But it’s worth it! Having a child - that beauty is unexplainable!”

And I was fine.

No postpartum depression. Back to work in a few months. Giving Nina the love, goofiness and care she required, yet also continuing as a working mama. Living the hippy lifestyle in the countryside with cows and ponies in the front yard, chickens lining the 80-inhabitant town’s muddy streets, roosters crowing every morning, birds singing all day, fig and citrus trees landscaping my office window.

My typical day consists of the following:

Up at 6am at Nina’s call for boob. Then daddy and mommy play with her in bed. I move to the kitchen to cook breakfast. As a progressive mamma it needs to be something fresh every day, and with her egg, peanut and banana allergies, that gets complicated. After eating, I play with her while my husband cleans up after breakfast. If I have a work call, Chino (aka daddy) takes over, and vice versa. By 11am she’s napping, while I figure out lunch. After lunch, we rush to leave the house by 12:30pm to get Nina to daycare.

Then I have 3 or 5 hours (depending on who makes the long drive into town that day) to work on United Nations (UN) communications projects. I’ve got 4 gigs going on at the same time, from education in Ukraine to oxygen stuff in New York, to cardboard toy boxes in Copenhagen to a parenting app in Australia. Some days nothing happens; on others, everything happens. It’s all over the place, and I kinda wish I got that stupid full-time, fixed-term UN job that HR said I was the most qualified for when it came down to the final three candidates. But hey, politics decided another way.

At 5pm the cooking/cleaning/playing round starts again. After Nina goes to bed, Chino and I have an hour or two to chat, cuddle, wind down, watch a series, read, take another work call, finish a work project, or, if energy allows ... the more personal things. But there’s only time for one thing on this list.

Then we conk out to rewind for the next day.

6am up. Cook for Nina. Clean for Nina. Play with Nina. Nap Nina. Cook for Nina. Clean for Nina. Nina to daycare. Work. Cook for Nina. Clean for Nina. Bathe Nina. Play with Nina. Sleep Nina. 2 hours with my husband. Sleep.

Then again.

And again.

The birds chirp. The cow moos. Nina eats. Chino cleans. Bed.

And again.

And again.

…….

Realizing I have lost my Self didn’t come on strong. More like a small leak in the basement sink, in a room you disregard, never enter anymore because you forgot the use of it. As time wore on, the sink overflowed, flooding the floor, turning carpets moldy, and warping the wood, leaving everything nearly beyond repair.

…….

Before becoming a mom, I lived the digital nomad life with my husband, traveling from country to country, working remote jobs, making friends in all places, dancing and drinking in the evenings, and practicing yoga daily. I was moving up in my career and making good money. Oh, and one important point: I found the time to write a damn book – 107,000-word memoir I transformed into a well-structured, fictional tale (yet to be published).

When we decided to have a child, we knew the risks. We knew we wouldn’t be able to travel or go out like we did before. But I was tired of the same old bar nights, the pointless conversations. Also, the digital nomads suddenly became so young. Naïve pieces of Tuluminati shit making loads of money from crypto or by selling some digital software and could only strike up surface level conversations about their rad travel experiences.

So, we were ready.

And we were happy.

Are happy.

As they say, your child is your greatest joy. I can’t deny that. She’s so funny and beautiful and magical. And Chino is the greatest. I wouldn’t be living in the middle of fucking nowhere Argentina if he wasn’t.

But day after day, routine after routine, my life never changed. Nina’s life changed, that’s for sure. First roll, first step, smile, laugh, words. She’s running and playing jokes on us now at just 17 months old! A gorgeous little smartass.

But my life stays stuck. I forgot about the faucet as it dripped downstairs, overflowing the basement sink. Instead, I stayed on the main floor, trapped in my routine.

Soon enough, two years passed since we moved to the countryside, four years since I left my friendship tribe in Copenhagen.

Day after day I lost contact with friends from all over the world. Some disappeared too, like me, as new parents with their kid duties. Others went out to concerts, hosted dinner parties, advanced in their careers, splashing beauty on my Instagram feed.

And day after day I just … aged.

…..

I haven’t admitted my late-post-partum-losing-self-slump to anyone. Not even to myself until this morning.

I don’t cry about it. I don’t stress about it. I’m not anxious. I’m just ... slumped.

And I can’t do it anymore.

It’s time to fight out of the slump, use the hormones of menstruation flowing in me right now to break free! Push myself over that hill! Fire me up! Tighten the basement sink and find that crucial balance between motherhood and Self.

……..

My 2-part slump breaking strategy

1. MOVE

We are done with the countryside. DONE. We gotta be back in the city. I need fucking friends again. I need to go to concerts, dance salsa, host dinner parties, invite gals over to paint and do yoga.

So, we bought an apartment in downtown, chaotic-as-fuck microcenter Buenos Aires, sitting just between the theatre and government districts, blocks away from the best cafes, restaurants, art shops, on a famous street where politicians and artists reside.

We needed something, but perhaps we went a bit too bold?

We bought it in physical cash – 10k wads of Benjamins piled on the table of an office in a downtown Santandar bank. For those who have never done property transactions in Argentina, this sounds insane. And yes, it is. Our entire life savings from my backpack to the sellers’ backpacks. It was terrifying to watch countless days, weeks, and years of work reduced to fragile stacks of green paper, lying before us as the notary droned on in legal lingo, and we signed document after document.

Chino and I had been trying for months to get our life moving, somehow, somewhere. We applied to hundreds of jobs, thought up a thousand scenarios on how our life would run, spending all day scanning emails to see if any fish bit our casted lines.

But nothing happened. So, we plunged into the water ourselves with our life savings in hand, diving deep into chaotic Buenos Aires.

The plan with the apartment is to have a beautiful home to base ourselves from. But I also hope it will help me stay in touch with old and new friends. Most of my friends travel. Most of them want to visit Argentina one day. I’ll lure them here for a visit with my new bad ass apartment. We can do home exchanges, host Airbnb wierdos, co-working spaces, and get our lives moving!

2. PUBLISH YOUR DAMN BOOK!

God damn it, if I do the math right, I spent over 3,000 hours writing this thing. If those were work hours, I’d be a fucking millionaire. This book, Gut Love, is a decade of my crazy life organized into a full-length narrative non-fiction memoir.

I tried the publishing world, sent over 500 query letters, entered several contests. Nothing. Not even one reply from a human being giving any sort of feedback.

But everyone who reads it – friends, families, beta readers – say they love it. They were inspired. They cried. They said it motivated them to travel again, love more deeply, see the world differently.

So, it’s gotta be worth it.

AND IT IS.

I just read parts of it again with Chino this past weekend, and it’s so damn good. It inspired me to write this blog for Christ’s sake!

I’m gonna move forward, pay an editor, and self-publish this thing. I’ll build a digital comms plan and get it out there.

Note to readers: If you can recommend a good, affordable editor for narrative memoirs, please let me know!

This part of my “slump breaking strategy” is frightening. If I’m trying to sell a book about myself, published by myself, I gotta sell myself. Ohh and I hate that. I sell UNICEF. I sell Rain Barrel. I communicate for other purposes.

But myself?

I’m 38 years old. I don’t fucking care anymore. Let it all out Amanda!!!

….

There are other parts to my slump freeing strategy, like socializing more by joining the local gym, participating in more tennis tournaments, and finding new writers’ groups.

But if I don’t move, and if I don’t be bold about my book publishing plan, I’ll just stay in the countryside, whining about never finding a publisher, as new eye wrinkles appear each month.

I gotta move.

I gotta cut down the shame.

I gotta turn off the leaking sink, clean up the moldy shit, and find Me again.

Note: As I was scrolling to find images to use for this post, I couldn't find one image of me, by myself over the past 1.5 years. So I took this selfie today.