After Her, I Became the Navy

Inspired by Robyn Wilder’s “We Need to Talk About Motherhood”

“Nobody talks about the grief.”

That was the line that undid me.

And maybe not even grief in the obvious sense — but a grief that hides in strange places: like silence, resentment, overstimulation, or the desperate need for one square metre of space to be yours alone.

Wilder writes, “Nobody talks about the grief,” and I’ve come to believe that she’s right. But I would also add this:

Nobody talks about the disorientation. Not just from the sleepless nights or the demands of keeping a small human alive — but from suddenly living in a world where your time, your body, your thoughts, even your silence, no longer belong entirely to you.

It’s not that I miss who I was before her. I’ve outgrown that version of me. But I do grieve the freedom — the kind of space where you could pause, reflect, roam without consequence. That quiet room inside your own life where you could think deeply, or not think at all. Motherhood didn't take that room away. It bulldozed the building.

Like waking up at sea, in a vessel you don’t remember boarding, with no map and no land in sight. That’s what early motherhood felt like to me. Not drowning. Not quite. But no longer on solid ground either.

And nobody tells you that even as you become more powerful — more capable, more strategic, more agile — you also become more exposed. Because now, you have something to lose. And it lives outside your body, carries your heart in its tiny fists, and demands love in every moment — even the ones where you feel like you’re losing yourself.

For someone like me — anxiety-driven, outcome-oriented, someone who builds backup plans for her backup plans — motherhood became a battlefield I didn’t know how to map. Not because it was loveless. But because love, in this form, asks everything of you — your body, your time, your attention, your identity — all while you’re pretending to function in the world like you’ve got it together.

And still, none of that prepared me for the real pressure — not from the child, but from the world that surrounds the child.

The new role you’re pushed into. The social constructs. The unspoken expectations. The performance of being a certain kind of mother in a room full of other mothers. The metrics that don’t exist on paper but govern everything: milestones, appearances, how well you balance it all with grace.

Even if you never signed up to play that game — you’re handed the board and the pieces and expected to get on with it.

And that’s where the real disorientation sets in. The terrain shifts. The rules change. The village you imagined isn’t what you thought it would be — and often, it doesn’t show up at all.

And the strange part is: I function well under pressure. I’m the strategist. The one with the plans — A, B, C, and the one where the world caves in. But this was different. The battlefield here wasn’t logic. It was love. And love doesn’t care about strategy — not when it’s 3 a.m. and someone needs you not because you’re competent, but because you’re theirs.

I used to think power looked like an army. Structured. Loud. Unshakeable. But motherhood taught me something else:

Sometimes, you don’t have the army. You have a navy — quieter, more adaptive, built to weather storms with less visibility and no applause.

And if you’re smart, you learn how to lead that navy. You learn to navigate blind, to pivot with the wind, to carry your strength beneath the surface.

That’s the kind of power motherhood gave me.

So you adapt. You change the rules of war. You learn to outthink. Outwait. Outsacrifice. You fight the battles no one sees with yourself — and the one where your child wants to wear a wool hat and gloves on a 28-degree day and the world expects you to smile through it.

Motherhood didn’t teach me power. It taught me strategy. It taught me how to pivot. How to recalibrate when the army you thought you needed doesn’t show up — but you still have a navy. It taught me how to choose love not because it’s beautiful, but because it’s the only thing that works.

And if I could whisper something to the woman I was before this began — the one full of strategy and control — I’d tell her that the biggest challenge won’t be the child. It won’t even be the loss of sleep or the identity shift. It will be the construct. The performance. The house of cards we’re expected to build on sand and call a life.

I’d tell her she can choose not to play that game — not the one motherhood creates, but the one society attaches to it. The one that asks you to shrink, smile, over-function and stay silent while pretending it’s all instinct.

Robyn Wilder gave us a sentence that cracked the silence. This is mine:

Motherhood is a threshold. And it’s a war. But in the best version of it — the version where you don’t perform, but stay — you don’t lose yourself. You become strategic with your power. And you build a different kind of freedom — not the kind you once had, but the kind you’ve earned, hostile sea to hostile coast, knowing exactly who you are now.

That’s my navy. And even when I feel lost at sea, I know now: I command it.