By Camilla van Rosendal
Lately, I have found myself wondering about the strange patterning of modern motherhood, and how many versions of a woman are asked to exist inside a single day.
There are evenings where I arrive at the kitchen bench long after dinner has been cleared, the house finally softened into sleep, and realise with a kind of bewilderment that I have been speaking all day without ever quite hearing myself.
Not because I have been absent from my own life. Quite the opposite. I have been so completely inside it – needed by it, absorbed by it – that, by evening, it can feel strangely difficult to find the thread of myself inside the day.
Motherhood has a way of scattering your attention into places your body has already left, as though some invisible part of you remains behind in the rooms where love briefly needed something.
A rushed goodbye at school drop-off returns unexpectedly while standing at the sink, your hands submerged in warm water, replaying itself with the persistence of a song you did not mean to memorise. The fleeting moment you answered too quickly, too tiredly, now carrying an emotional gravity disproportionate to its size.
Did I sound impatient?
Were they already carrying something I didn’t notice?
Should I have crouched down instead of calling across the room?
What stays with me is not the moment itself, but the way motherhood refuses clean endings.
A child’s disappointment from breakfast can remain gently open somewhere inside you while the rest of the day unfurls around it. A passing comment in the car – offered casually, almost carelessly – returns hours later while folding washing, suddenly glowing with the possibility that it meant more than you first understood. Even joy behaves this way. The sleepy weight of a small hand in yours lingering like warmth after sunlight. A sentence spoken at pickup tucked into yourself, already aware that one day it will ache with distance.
Love, in motherhood, can feel oddly porous.
You are never entirely where you are.
Some part of you is still circling a child’s sadness, revisiting the morning, anticipating tomorrow’s needs. And threaded through all of this is the quiet expectation that you will keep becoming whoever is needed next: practical, patient, organised, emotionally steady.
Then evening arrives and another shape-shift is required. To move from mothering into partnership. From logistics into presence. To remember that beneath the practical rhythms of a shared life lives something softer too – companionship, intimacy, the quiet maintenance of love. Yet often there is so little space between these versions of ourselves that we arrive carrying the emotional weight of every role that came before, still half inside the day.
We move between selves with startling speed. And I wonder if part of what feels difficult to name about modern motherhood lives here – not only in the pace of it, but in the absence of transition. The way one version of ourselves dissolves almost instantly into the next, with so little space to register the crossing.
A difficult morning can still be resting somewhere inside you while the rest of the day asks something entirely different. You are answering emails while mentally replaying a conversation that ended hours ago, making dinner while still carrying the faint ache of something your child said in passing, attempting to arrive in partnership while part of you remains caught in the invisible logistics of tomorrow.
We become so practised at this movement that we rarely stop to question what it asks of us.
Yet it is difficult not to wonder whether human life once contained more visible edges – not easier rhythms, nor gentler ones, but transitions that unfolded slowly enough for something internal to catch up.
There is something about this that feels quietly misplaced now.
Not because life was easier – it almost certainly was not. But because human living once carried more natural instructions for transition.
Darkness arrived slowly enough to announce the day was ending. Distance existed between places, requiring people to walk home rather than switch instantly between roles. Repetitive, shared tasks gave thought somewhere to settle. Even the natural world still seems to understand that change rarely happens all at once. Tide retreats gradually. Light leaves in increments. Seasons arrive through subtle negotiations between what is ending and what has not quite begun.
Returning to ourselves may once have been woven more naturally into ordinary life – not something scheduled after exhaustion, or earned once every need had been met, but something quietly held inside the rhythm of being human.
Which makes me wonder whether part of what feels so difficult in modern motherhood is not only the pace, but the absence of anything that helps us cross between selves.
Psychologists have long understood that ritual helps us recognise transition – an ending, a beginning, a crossing from one state into another. Even small acts can help the mind reorganise itself around change.
What feels absent in modern motherhood is not only support, though that matters deeply, but pause. Something that gently marks the movement between one version of ourselves and the next. Something that says:
this part is over now.
You may place it down.
You may gather yourself before beginning again.
Finding our way back to ourselves may not be indulgent at all, but necessary – a way of marking the crossings modern motherhood so rarely pauses to acknowledge.
The small things that gather me back to myself have started to feel different now.
Not self-care exactly – that language has always felt too polished, too easily folded into the endless project of optimising a life already asking too much.
Something more ancient than that.
Writing before the house wakes, while the world still feels briefly untouched. Standing outside long enough to notice the shape of the sky changing overhead. Music that interrupts the static of thought. The ocean. Even a small pocket of uninterrupted silence where the texture of an inner life begins to re-emerge after so much time spent turned toward everyone else.
Endless connection was never the point. It feels a little like standing at the shoreline demanding the tide never leave.
The tide leaves.
And still, it returns.
What matters is not whether we stay endlessly connected to ourselves, but whether we know where the shoreline is. Whether, after the inevitable scattering, we know what gathers us again.
What are the places that return me to myself?
What are the doorways?
The things that make the world feel briefly wider again, that loosen whatever has tightened inside me after a day spent tending to everyone else. The small rituals that remind me I am not only mother, organiser, partner, keeper of endless invisible things – but also someone with an inner life still waiting patiently beneath the surface of ordinary days.
The self is not lost in motherhood, not entirely.
She waits in the places that remember how to bring us home.
If this piece stirred something in you, the 5-Day Return to Yourself series through the Peaceful Mama Project offers a gentle place to begin – a free 5-day guided return to your internal reference point.
Camilla van Rosendal is a writer, mother and founder of the Peaceful Mama Project based on the Sunshine Coast. Her work explores motherhood, identity and the quiet thresholds women move through across seasons of life. She is the author of Scatter to Bloom: Conversations with My Intuition.
