Do you really forget your pre-children life? Here’s what an expert says

If it feels as though you’ve forgotten what it was like before you had children, you’re not alone – and there’s science behind it. 

When you become a parent, the early days of constant feeding and lack of sleep that makes you feel delirious, there's very little time or headspace to think of anything other than survival. 

However, do you forget your life before you had children entirely? When the dust settles and life with settle into the swing of life with your new baby, there will inevitably be moments where you think of the life you had 'before,' but some people claim they end up forgetting about life pre-kids entirely. According to an expert, there are reasons for this. 

Psychotherapist Hannah Beckett-Pratt, shares with Yahoo! Life, “The processes of pregnancy and birth can be useful as an analogy for what happens for women psychologically and intrapsychically [occurring within the mind] when they become mothers.”

As the unborn baby develops during pregnancy, preparing to enter the world, the woman is preparing to ‘give birth’ to herself as mother, she explains. This can happen consciously, when the mother thinks about what it might be like when her baby arrives, or how she wants to parent, and unconsciously, when she develops a connection to her baby in the womb.  

She adds, "This process is called 'maternal preoccupation' and intensifies after birth, in order for the mother and baby to form an attachment so the baby can survive and develop.”

Of course, after birth, a baby is entirely dependent on their parents and maternal preoccupation can become so strong that the mother finds it impossible to imagine herself without a baby, or her life before she had one. 

It can be quite disorientating, too, because as adults we aren’t used to being totally consumed by the needs of someone who entirely depends on us. Beckett-Pratt adds, “It leads us to bizarre new states of mind as we integrate our new 'mother' identity with our 'woman' identity."

Among the disorientating experiences mothers might experience are forgetting who they are, what they did before they had a baby, difficulty relating to their partners, and finding it difficult to return to work because they feel like different people. 

Mum-of-two, Lucy, believes parents don't forget their lives pre-children, but come to accept a different way of living. She tells us "In the early days of having young babies, I thought about my old life constantly. I daydreamed of the freedom and the ease of going about everyday activities that I'd totally taken for granted before.

After a while I thought about that life less. As my children got older and the gap between my old life and the new one grew, it seemed inevitable I wouldn't think about it as much. But that's probably not because I'd forgotten about it, but simply embraced my new reality as a mother because that's what my life is and there's no point living in the past. I won't forget my old life - it has too many precious memories for that to happen."

In related news, emotionally healthy children need their parents to do these 10 important things, while diagnosis later in life and sensory demands of parenting ‘disrupt well-being’ of autistic mothers. There's also reasons why 'high-achieving women' may struggle with motherhood, according to a postpartum therapist.