The Boots in the Back of the Closet
There is a pair of boots in the back of my closet that I haven't worn since before the baby. Heeled, impractical, slightly ridiculous, purchased for a version of my life with somewhere to be at 9 p.m. Every few months I find them, and every time a small argument breaks out: throw them away, you're not that person anymore versus keep them, you might be that person again versus, quietly, who even is that person now.
The boots are not really about the boots. They're about her — the woman I was before. And most of the advice on offer about her comes in two flavors, both of them wrong. One says bury her: she's dead, mourn her, move on, motherhood is your whole identity now. The other says resurrect her: bounce back, get your body and your life and your old self returned exactly as they were, as if nothing happened. Neither of those is survivable.
Don't Bury Her
When you bury the woman you were, you don't actually get rid of her — you just lose access to everything she was carrying. Her ambition. Her humor. Her taste. The parts of you that had nothing to do with anyone's care and feeding. Bury all that in the name of good motherhood and you wake up one day hollowed out, wondering why serving everyone you love feels like disappearing.
That hollow feeling has a real shape, and this magazine names it often: the slow slide into becoming the background of everyone else's life while your own goes unwatched. The woman you were is not a threat to your child. She's the reservoir you draw from when the days are long. Empty the reservoir and there's nothing left to give.
Burial also has a way of confusing your kids later, though that's years off. Children don't actually want a mother who's been sanded down to pure function. They want, eventually, to know the person — what she loved before them, what makes her laugh until she can't breathe, what she's good at that has nothing to do with them. The self you're tempted to erase in the name of devotion is the same self they'll one day be proud to have come from.
The old you is not gone. She may just need a different entrance.
Don't Worship Her Either
The opposite mistake is turning her into a shrine. You know the fantasy — if you can just get back to the old body, the old flat stomach, the old freedom, you'll have proven that motherhood didn't cost you anything. But she's not coming back intact, and demanding that she does turns your present self into a permanent disappointment, always failing to be a photograph.
Worshipping the old you is just nostalgia in a flattering outfit. It edits her, too — forgets that she had her own 3 a.m. worries, her own dissatisfactions, her own things she was running from. She was a whole person, not a highlight reel. Refusing the impossible math of restoration is exactly what the no bounce-back stance is for.
Let Her Come With You, Edited
The third path is the honest one: bring her with you, but edited. Keep what's still true. Retire what isn't. Her love of a good sentence, her stubbornness, the music that makes her feel like herself — that comes. The Saturdays that ran on nobody's schedule but hers, the impractical boots — maybe those get a new, smaller form rather than a full return.
The old you doesn't need to be reinstalled. She needs a different entrance. Sometimes that entrance is absurdly small and concrete. Getting fully dressed on a hard day can be a tiny act of return — not a performance of your old life, just a door you crack open to remind yourself she's still in there.
So I kept the boots. I haven't worn them to a 9 p.m. anything in over a year. But I wore them to the grocery store on a Tuesday once, feeling faintly ridiculous and entirely like myself, and that was the whole point. The old you doesn't need her old occasions back. She just needs one small, unmistakable moment of being let out.
She's Not Gone
The woman you were before is not a casualty of motherhood. She's a former version who's still on staff — consulted, updated, occasionally overruled, never fired. You are allowed to miss her and evolve past her in the same afternoon.
Don't hold a funeral. Don't build an altar. Just leave a door open, and let her walk through it in whatever edited, honest form still fits the life you actually have. She'll surprise you with what she remembers how to do.
