Hello, my friends!

Happy Mother's Day to me!

For 10 years, other people said it first. My husband. My siblings. My church community.

Especially the children singing Mother's Day songs every year at church who handed me flowers before I'd technically earned the title.

It was kind. But deep inside, it was hard to receive. Because physically and literally, I wasn't yet a mother.

This year, I'm saying it to myself.

Ten years is a long time to hold something in anticipation. Ten years of accepting flowers I didn't know how to hold. Ten years of being celebrated for who I was becoming, while grieving, quietly, that I wasn't there yet.

I'm here now. And the first person I wanted to tell was me.

This is the new me. And I'm not going back.

One of the things I discovered postpartum is the idea and social pressure for new moms to return to their old selves, look like their old selves, and feel like their old selves after giving birth.

The expectation is for you to reach that state as quickly as possible.

I realized this while scrolling on social media — which, to be honest, I should have stayed off of.

I started seeing videos. Before-and-after posts.

Mothers, just weeks postpartum, showing off how quickly they had lost the baby weight. The skin care routines. Hair care routines. New moms returning to full-time work after 1 week of giving birth — and have the time to vlog.

Crazy, I know. But it's on the internet so it must be true. 😉

I want to tell you what watching those posts felt like to me.

It said: if you don't look like this, you're not trying hard enough. If you haven't bounced back, you must not care enough about yourself.

My husband and I don't have family nearby. It's just the two of us figuring this out. In those first weeks, my days and nights were all blurred together. I was feeding her every two to three hours around the clock.

Some mornings I genuinely could not tell you when I had last washed my face.

I was surviving. Beautifully, sacredly, exhaustedly surviving.

And the world was telling me I should look like those mom influencers by now.

This was also the same week I tried to pick my daughter up off the floor and my legs were shaking from the postpartum pain and muscle weakness. I had to stop, steady myself, and try again very carefully.

For a moment there, I missed my pre-baby body. For a second, I wished to go back to when I was stronger, faster, and well-rested.

And then I felt bad for feeling that way.

I look at my newborn daughter and reminded myself this was the moment I prayed for years and worked hard for.

The bounce-back pressure reaches everyone. The pressure to return to their past selves.

You might wish to be as thin as you were in high school, before life's challenges took their toll.

You might long for the energy you had in your 20s, before your career and family responsibilities.

It's anyone who has been through something that changed them, and is now running hard toward the wrong finish line.

Or worse: running in the wrong direction entirely.

Dr. Kyra Bobinet names this in Unstoppable Brain: "I Used to Be" thinking.

When you measure your current self against a past version, your brain registers it as failure.

That failure signal activates the habenula, a small structure deep in the brain that functions as a motivation kill switch. It suppresses drive. It drains energy. It produces the chemical equivalent of: why bother.

The "bounce back" pressure tells your brain you've already failed. And once your brain decides that, it stops helping you try.

That person doesn't exist anymore. Your brain reads the search for that person as evidence you've failed. And it acts accordingly.

James Clear discusses the concept of identity-based change, which has really resonated with me.

Instead of saying, "I'm trying to get back to who I was," which focuses on the past, it's better to say, "I am a healthy person in a new phase of life," which looks forward.

For me, it's clear now: I am a mother, and there's no returning to the past.

I'm grateful for who I am now, even on the chaotic days. I'm building my new self up from here. Taking what I learned from my pre-baby self. And genuinely excited for the life ahead with my husband and my baby girl.

I'm greeting myself Happy Mother's Day to acknowledge the season. To say: this is who I am now, and this is where I'm building from.

So let me ask you something.

Which version of your past self are you wishing you could go back to?

Sit with that. Because that's probably the finish line that's been pulling you in the wrong direction.

And then, redirect. Here's how:

To the mothers reading this: Happy Mother's Day. You are doing something irreplaceable. On the hardest days, especially.

To the soon-to-be mothers: you're already becoming. Keep going.

And to those of you who are waiting, the way I waited for 10 years: I see you.

My husband used to greet me on Mother's Day with those words: celebrate your potential. It was refusing to let me disappear into the waiting. So I'm saying it to you the same way he said it to me.

Celebrate who you're becoming.

If you're in a season of transition and you're not sure what to build next, that's exactly what I'm working on.

I'm developing a new offer. Before I build it out, I want to know if it's something you'd actually use.

It’s called a custom action plan. Here's what it is:

Tap the poll above. Or you could also just hit reply.

Either way, I read everything.

Talk soon,

Grazelle 🌱