My Highlight Time is a HiMoment column where real readers share the small, often unspoken moments of self-care, connection, and discovery that shaped them. Names have been changed to protect privacy.
Coming Home to Myself After Becoming a Mother
By Priya, 34 — Seattle, WA
There is a version of me that existed before my children, and I want to be honest about how long it took me to stop grieving her.
Not grieving in the dramatic sense. Not wailing into pillows or anything cinematic. More like a low, constant hum of loss I carried through the early months and then the early years, the feeling that the woman I used to be had quietly stepped out of the room and forgotten to leave a forwarding address.
I had my first daughter, Mira, when I was twenty-nine. My son, Aarav, came twenty-two months later. For anyone doing the math, yes, I was pregnant or postpartum for the better part of three years. I say this not for sympathy but for context. My body was not my own for a very long time. And somewhere in the fog of nursing schedules and sleep regressions and the thick, syrupy exhaustion that no amount of coffee could cut through, I forgot what it felt like to simply exist inside my own skin without someone else needing something from it.
I am a writer by trade. Before kids, I would spend whole Saturday mornings in our apartment in Fremont, drinking black tea and working on essays in my underwear. I liked the quiet. I liked the particular weight of a morning where nothing was urgent. My husband Raj would be reading on the couch, or making dosa in the kitchen, and we would exist in this parallel warmth that I did not appreciate nearly enough at the time.
After the kids, Saturday mornings became triage. Someone needed to be fed. Someone had a diaper situation. Someone was crying, and half the time that someone was me, standing in the bathroom with the door locked for thirty seconds of silence while Raj negotiated with a toddler over a banana.
The Body That Didn’t Feel Like Mine
I want to talk about something that nobody warned me about, or maybe they did and I wasn’t listening. After Aarav was born, I became what a friend of mine calls “touched out.” It is a strange term for something that is not strange at all. When you have spent an entire day with small hands grabbing at you, with a baby latched to your chest, with a toddler climbing your legs like you are a tree designed specifically for her amusement, the last thing you want at the end of it is more touch.
This was hard for Raj. Not because he pressured me. He never did. But I could see the distance settling between us like dust on a shelf, and neither of us knew how to wipe it clean. We were excellent co-parents. We ran our household like a small, efficient nonprofit. But somewhere between the meal prep and the pediatrician appointments, we had stopped reaching for each other. Not just sexually, though that too. I mean we had stopped putting a hand on the other’s shoulder while passing in the hallway. Stopped sitting close enough on the couch for our knees to touch.
I missed him. I missed him while he was right there.
And beneath that, quieter and harder to name, I missed myself. The version of me that liked being touched. That found pleasure in small physical things: a hot bath, a stretch in the morning, the feeling of my own hands rubbing lotion into my legs after a shower. All of that had become mechanical. Functional. My body was a tool for caregiving, and I had forgotten it could be anything else.
A Tuesday in January
The shift did not happen all at once. There was no single revelation, no montage. But I can point to a night.
It was January. Seattle in January is dark by four-thirty, and it had been raining for what felt like the entirety of human history. Both kids were finally asleep. Raj was downstairs watching something. I was sitting on the edge of our bed, still in the sweatshirt I had been wearing for two days, and I caught a glimpse of myself in the dresser mirror.
I did not recognize her. Not in the way people say in movies. More like I recognized her too well. I knew every tired line, every unwashed strand of hair, every place where the sweatshirt hung off a body that had changed and changed again. And I thought, very clearly: when was the last time I did something just for this body? Not feeding it because I needed fuel to keep going. Not showering because I smelled like spit-up. Something gentle. Something slow. Something that was only for me.
I could not remember.
So I ran a bath. This sounds small. It was not small. It required telling Raj I was going to be unavailable for an hour. It required resisting the urge to bring my phone in with me, or to listen for the baby monitor, or to use the time to shave my legs because I “should.” I just sat in the water. I let it be hot. I let it be quiet. I closed my eyes and put my hands on my own stomach, not to assess it or judge it, but just to feel it. The softness that two pregnancies had left. The skin that had stretched and come back different.
I cried a little. Not from sadness. From something closer to recognition. Oh, there you are.
Something Shifted
After that bath, I started making small appointments with myself. That is the only way I can describe it. Not a full self-care overhaul. Not a Pinterest board of rituals. Just: on Thursday night, after the kids are down, I am going to do one thing for my body that is not about maintenance.
Sometimes it was the bath again. Sometimes it was lying on the bedroom floor with the lights off, just breathing. Sometimes it was rubbing oil into my hands slowly enough to actually feel the warmth of it. These were five-minute things. Ten minutes, tops. But they were mine.
After a few weeks, Raj noticed something. Not a dramatic change. He said I seemed “softer.” Which I initially took the wrong way, because I am a postpartum woman and we are conditioned to hear the word “soft” as a critique. But he meant my edges. The way I was holding my shoulders. The way I had started leaning into him again on the couch during our twenty minutes of television before we both passed out.
One night, he asked if we could just lie together. No expectations. He said he missed touching me and being touched by me and he did not care what it led to or didn’t lead to. I said yes. We lay on top of the covers, still in our pajamas, and he ran his hand along my arm while we talked about nothing. The dog next door. A leak in the kitchen faucet. His mother’s upcoming visit.
It was the most intimate I had felt in over a year. Not because of what we were doing, but because of what we weren’t doing. We weren’t performing. We weren’t trying to get somewhere. We were just two people who had chosen each other, lying in a bed they shared, letting touch be its own point.
After that, things came back slowly. Not to what they were before. I don’t think they were supposed to. But we started having what I think of as an ongoing conversation with each other’s bodies. Some nights it was just a long hug in the kitchen while the dishwasher ran. Some nights it was more, and on one of those nights we used something Raj had quietly ordered from HiMoment, and we laughed at ourselves a little, and it was good not because the thing itself was magic but because we were willing to be curious together again. To try something without a goal. To let pleasure be exploratory, not performative.
That willingness. That was the thing I had lost. Not the desire itself, but the willingness to be open to it.
What I Know Now
My kids are three and almost-two now. I am still tired most of the time. I still wear the same sweatshirt too many days in a row. I still sometimes flinch when someone touches me at the end of a long day, and I am learning not to feel guilty about that.
But I have stopped waiting for the old version of me to walk back through the door. She is not coming back. And that is okay, because the woman who is here now, the one with the softer stomach and the harder-won patience and the ability to cry in a bathtub and call it progress, she is someone I am learning to like.
I think motherhood asks you to dissolve. To pour yourself into these tiny, perfect people so completely that for a while you cannot find your own edges. And that is necessary and beautiful and also devastating. The coming back is not about returning to who you were. It is about building a new relationship with the body you have now. The one that grew humans. The one that is tired and strong and still capable of pleasure if you are patient enough to let it find its way there.
Raj and I are not the couple we were before kids. We are quieter. We are more deliberate. We have less time and more tenderness. On good nights, after the monitor goes silent and the house settles, we reach for each other in the dark, and it feels like the most honest thing either of us has done all day.
I am not the woman I was. But last Thursday, I sat on the edge of the bed and caught myself in the mirror again. Same dresser, same spot. And this time, I did not look away.
I looked, and I thought: I know you.
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