Most women I’ve spoken to about motherhood describe some version of losing themselves in it, gradually, without a clear moment they could point to.

The roles accumulated, the demands expanded, and somewhere in there, the person they were before became harder to “see”.

Sue is a different kind of story.

The transition wasn’t easy – while Sue was a new mum, she was between a pandemic backdrop, an executive masters she was completing, and a full-time job at Meta, there was a lot happening at once.

But even in the middle of all of that, she was paying attention to herself.

Noticing what she was giving up. Making small, deliberate choices to hold onto parts of herself alongside the new identity she was stepping into.

I first met Sue in 2020 at a personal development event and she said she liked my energy. That already tells you a little about how apt Sue is in reading people.

Over the years, we became friends and she also became something of an unofficial mentor to me, which meant I had a front-row seat to how she navigated things, including this.

Her story isn’t about having it all figured out. It’s about someone who chose, again and again, to stay curious about who she was becoming, even when it was easier to drift.

Sue, in her own words

“Life when I became a mum, which is five years ago now, was quite unusual. It was the back end of the pandemic and the circuit breaker in Singapore. I was a student, I’d gone back to business school pursuing my executive masters in organisational behaviour, and I also worked full time. So it was an amalgamation of mat leave but not being fully on mat leave, the pandemic at the backdrop, and quite frankly being really busy.

My experience of becoming a mum wasn’t the only experience I was navigating at the time, which in itself made it quite a unique period.

On identity, if I think back to before I became a mum, one of the concerns I had was really around how becoming a mum was going to affect my ambition and how it was going to affect my career. I had worked really hard to get to where I was at Meta when I became a mum, and I was very nervous that my career was going to stall.

Interestingly enough, I think I’m not less ambitious. It just shifted. It shifted in a way that I wanted to prioritise being a present parent, but equally I wanted to do the things that were important to me in terms of career and other parts of my life.

When my daughter turned one was the first time I went on a trip with a friend by myself. That was such a good experience for me, to reclaim more of who I was before I became a mum and start that new life where even as a mum, I get to go away and do something for myself without necessarily having to feel guilt about it. I went to Bali and I remember it was incredibly soul nourishing. Whilst I did miss my daughter Logan, it was just so liberating.

What I know now is that it is a season. At the time I couldn’t have predicted how becoming a mum was going to fit in with me as a daughter, as a wife, as someone’s friend. But what I realised is it was a season where for a period of time I was so much more focused on my baby and on my family. That season shifted eventually, and my identity also shifted in a way that it made space for me as a mum, as a new identity alongside all the other identities and roles I played already.

I would say you can’t really overthink it too much in terms of what the experience is going to feel like or how it will impact your career, because what it ends up being in reality you could never imagine that beforehand. But somehow you work it out and somehow you just adapt.”

What paying attention actually looks like

Sue’s story closes out this month’s series in a specific way.

Kelly held her ground when the noise got loud. Shin let go of an old identity to build a new one. Huimin found that the roles compound rather than compete. Vanessa uncovered what her competence had been hiding.

Each of them navigated the threshold of motherhood in a way that was specific to who they were going into it.

What’s distinct about Sue’s experience is the frame she brought from the start. She was worried about her ambition, which is a real and common fear, and she names it honestly.

But she was also, from the beginning, paying attention to what she needed to stay herself inside the transition rather than waiting until something broke to ask the question.

The Bali trip at one year postpartum is a small detail that carries a lot of weight. It was a deliberate choice to reclaim something, the version of herself that existed before the new identity arrived, and to establish early that this was going to be possible going forward. That motherhood was a new identity being added to the existing ones, not a replacement for them.

That’s not something you arrive at naturally. It’s something you choose, usually more than once, in small moments that don’t feel significant at the time.

The season framing

Something Sue said that I keep coming back to: it is a SEASON.

That framing does something important. It acknowledges the intensity and the focus required in the early years, the period where the baby and the family necessarily take up most of the available space, without suggesting that this is permanent or that the rest of you has gone somewhere it can’t return from.

Seasons shift. The identity that felt crowded out in the early years doesn’t disappear. It waits. When the season changes, there’s room again, not for the old version exactly, because that version is also changed, but for something that holds both.

What the inner work makes possible in any threshold season is that you don’t have to wait for the season to shift before you remember who you are. You can hold that knowledge even in the middle of the most demanding chapter, and let it inform the small choices you make along the way.

Sue did that.

That frame, staying curious rather than anxious, is something I’ve watched her bring to most things. It’s part of why she ended up as something of an unofficial mentor to me over the years. And it’s part of why her story felt like the right one to close this month with.

A closing thought on the series

This month I’ve shared 5 stories – Kelly, Shin, Huimin, Vanessa, and Sue. 5 different women, 5 different experiences of the same threshold moment, 5 different versions of the identity question that motherhood surfaces.

What I’ve noticed across all of them, and across the many more conversations I’ve had with clients navigating this season, is that the question is always the same underneath the specifics.

Who am I now that this is my life? What do I want, separate from what I’m needed for? Which parts of myself did I quietly set down in the transition, and was that a choice or did it just happen?

Those questions don’t only belong to motherhood. They belong to any season that asks something fundamental of you.

Motherhood is just one of the clearest threshold moments I see because it asks all of them at once, in the middle of everything else.

The women who navigate it well are the ones who stay in some kind of contact with themselves throughout. Who don’t wait for the season to end before they ask the question. Who choose, in small ways and imperfect ways, to hold onto who they are even as who they are is changing.

That’s what this month has been about.

If any of it resonated, whether you’re in this season or approaching it or looking back at it, a Drift Map Session is a good place to start. It’s a structured conversation to help you understand where you are, what’s shifting, and what the work might look like from here.🍃