16 hours ago

I don’t know who I am outside of being a mom

You can name every birthday, every grade, every photo — and still not recognize the woman in them.

This is the episode about the decade so many of us lose, and how to tell the difference between sacrificing for your

children and disappearing into them.

Leslie spent her thirties running four other people’s lives with the same intensity she had brought to a legal career.

From the outside it looked like a woman doing a great job — the school events, the photographs, the new creative

hobby everyone praised. From the inside there was no one left in there. She goes back into that decade honestly here,

including the part of the story that usually gets left out: she was not a martyr. Stepping away from the law was partly

devotion and partly escape, from a profession that never fit her, and the shame of that second half is what keeps most

women from looking at any of it.

She walks through the three anchors every woman needs — a place to go, a thing to do, something that is hers alone

— and shows how ordinary, devoted motherhood quietly reassigns all three. Her place became their places. Her thing

to do became their schedules. Even photography, the one thing she had fallen in love with, turned into a service she

provided to a school. It still looked like an anchor. It had stopped being one.

Then there is the moment it broke open. A retreat in Costa Rica, a circle of strangers, a blank sheet of paper, and a

woman who could have written out her children’s schedule from memory but could not write one sentence about who

she was.

The back half is the practical part. What psychologist Dana Crowley Jack called self-silencing, and what the research

does and does not say about what it costs. The clearest test Leslie has found between sacrifice and disappearance —

sacrifice is temporary, specific, and chosen, and you can still name what you gave up. And three questions, about

ninety seconds in total, that show you which anchor went first. The one you gave away first is usually the one that

leads you back.

If you are in the thick of it with young children, take this as a warning. If your house has gone quiet, take it as a door.

Either way, you do not have to wait for them to leave home to start.

CHAPTERS

0:00 The woman in the photographs I don’t recognize

2:30 The three anchors every woman needs — and where they go

5:30 Not a martyr: when motherhood is also an exit

8:45 Costa Rica, a blank page, and the moment I saw it

11:30 Self-silencing: why devoted, capable women disappear

14:00 Three questions — which one did you give away first?

18:30 Photography, travel, and the way back at 50

MENTIONED

The Three Anchors episode — [URL pending, see flags]

Dana Crowley Jack, Silencing the Self

The Loom Life · Pulling Threads, Weaving Authenticity · Publishing package