Or: How I Accidentally Became the Woman I Needed My Daughter to See
by Erika Matic – 33 years old, emotionally regulated, hormonally supervised, and no longer surviving exclusively on maternal instinct and cortisol
There’s a very specific kind of woman modern motherhood creates.
Not the glowing Instagram version holding a beige baby wrapped in ethically sourced linen while whispering about intuitive parenting. No. I mean the real version.
The woman who hasn’t slept properly in eleven months. Who smells faintly of breast milk and panic.
Who hasn’t had an uninterrupted thought since trimester two. Who is simultaneously keeping another human alive while privately wondering whether she herself is medically okay.
Four years ago, I became a mother.
Which sounds beautiful and cinematic until I tell you the full experience mostly involved autoimmune disease, hormonal chaos, fear, exhaustion, and carrying a screaming infant around my apartment like a deeply unstable marsupial.
- I have Hashimoto’s disease.
- I was overweight.
- I was mentally exhausted.
- I lost one pregnancy before my daughter.
- And during my second pregnancy, I spent nine months emotionally preparing for disaster while pretending to function normally in public.
Pregnancy after loss is psychologically fascinating in the same way hostage negotiations are fascinating.
People tell you to relax. You become physically incapable of relaxing. Everyone says: “Enjoy this magical time.” Meanwhile you’re googling symptoms at 2:13 AM like a woman preparing legal evidence against the universe.
Then my daughter arrived.
And I entered what I can only describe as the Great Maternal Dissolution.
The Era of Becoming One With the Baby
I exclusively breastfed. No pacifier. No bottle. No stroller because she screamed every time I attempted it like I had personally betrayed her ancestors.
So naturally, I became a full-time human transport system.
I carried her everywhere in a baby carrier while slowly losing all remaining structural integrity in my spine and personality. I was essentially a Balkan kangaroo with anxiety.
And for the first year, my entire existence became:
- feeding
- co-sleeping
- teething
- surviving
- repeating
She got all her teeth during her first year of life, which honestly felt medically unnecessary. There are medieval torture methods with better pacing.
I remember looking in the mirror during that phase and thinking: “Ah. So this is motherhood.”
Not glowing femininity. Not divine purpose. Just a woman eating cold food while holding a tiny dictator who hadn’t slept since Easter.
And yet – I loved her with a level of biological intensity that felt almost frightening.
That’s the strange thing nobody explains properly about motherhood. You can feel profoundly grateful and profoundly overwhelmed at the exact same time.
You can love your child deeply while quietly disappearing inside the process of caring for them.
The Extremely Socially Accepted Female Breakdown
After about a year and a half, I stopped breastfeeding. My daughter started walking. Life became easier. Which is when things became harder.
Because suddenly there was space again.
Space to notice myself.
Space to notice how unhappy I was.
Space to notice that I had slowly started using alcohol and unhealthy habits not because motherhood was impossible – but because I no longer knew how to exist outside survival mode.
And the terrifying part? It all looked relatively normal.
Wine culture for mothers is marketed like emotional first aid.
“Mommy needs a drink.”
“Wine o’clock.”
“Surviving motherhood.”
Entire industries now operate on the assumption that women raising children should ideally remain slightly sedated for the experience.
Which is interesting. Because if fathers collectively started coping through chronic emotional numbing, society would call it a crisis.
When mothers do it, someone puts it on a decorative kitchen sign.
So I drank.
Not catastrophically.
Not dramatically.
Just enough to remain disconnected from myself in a socially acceptable way. And for a while, I genuinely believed this was adulthood.
Exhausted.
Disconnected.
Slightly self-destructive.
Functioning, but privately deteriorating.
Very modern womanhood.
The Moment Everything Quietly Changed
Then one day, somewhere between exhaustion and clarity, I realised something deeply inconvenient: Nobody was coming to save me from my own habits.
- Not motherhood.
- Not motivation.
- Not “finding myself.”
- Not another Monday.
- Not some cinematic transformation sequence with inspirational background music.
If I wanted to feel better, I would have to become someone different repeatedly through small, boring decisions.
Tragic news for dramatic people.
So I started slowly.
- Less alcohol.
- More water.
- Short workouts.
- Better routines.
- More presence.
- Less emotional escapism disguised as “deserving a break.”
And at first, nothing felt profound.
There was no spiritual awakening.
No movie montage.
No sudden rebirth.
Just repetition.
The deeply unsexy reality of healing is that most of it looks embarrassingly ordinary.
Going to bed.
Drinking water.
Training consistently.
Saying no.
Showing up again.
And again.
And again.
Until one day your old life starts feeling heavier than the effort required to change it.
The Horrifying Discovery That Stability Feels Better
My daughter turned four yesterday.
And somewhere along these four years, I became the healthiest version of myself I have ever known.
- I lost 30 kilos.
- I stopped drinking.
- I train every day.
- I am present.
- I am calm.
- I am happy.
Not performatively happy. Not “posting inspirational quotes while privately collapsing” happy.
I’m actually happy.
And perhaps the most emotionally complicated part of all this is understanding that I didn’t change because motherhood magically transformed me.
I changed because eventually I realised my daughter was watching me.
Not listening.
Watching.
- Watching how I speak to myself.
- How I treat my body.
- How I regulate stress.
- How I love.
- How I cope.
- How I exist.
Children do not become what we instruct. They absorb what we normalise.
And I realised something quietly devastating: I didn’t just want to give my daughter a good life. I wanted to become an example of one.
Not perfection.
Not obsession.
Not performative wellness culture where everyone drinks celery juice while secretly hating themselves.
Just health. Peace. Consistency. Presence. A woman who does not need to escape her own life to survive it.
Motherhood Revealed Me
Motherhood did not destroy me. It revealed me.
It revealed every weakness.
Every coping mechanism.
Every insecurity.
Every unresolved fear.
Every way I abandoned myself while trying to care for everyone else.
And slowly – painfully, repetitively, quietly – it also revealed who I could become if I stopped disappearing inside my own exhaustion.
My daughter will not remember the breastfeeding schedules.
Or the baby carrier.
Or the sleepless nights.
Or whether I bought the correct developmental wooden toys approved by Scandinavian parenting blogs.
But she will remember who I was.
And maybe that’s the real responsibility of motherhood. Not just raising a child.
Raising yourself alongside them.
Into someone they can safely learn life from.
Erika Matic writes about discipline, motherhood, emotional recovery, modern womanhood, and the strange psychological experience of accidentally becoming healthier, calmer, and happier after years of functioning exclusively on survival mode. She believes healing is repetitive, motherhood is both beautiful and mildly psychologically destabilising, and children learn more from who we become than what we try to teach them.
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