Parenthood turns you into the person you were destined to become—whether you’ve known your entire life you wanted to be a parent or landed on this journey by surprise.

Before you were a mother, you were other. A yoga practitioner. A traveler. A business owner. Maybe you took cooking classes and had weekly coffee dates with your girlfriends. Maybe you spent weekends adventuring and doing house projects.

The journey into motherhood is a complex one. As the excitement and fodder around birth settles down, life around you resumes, continues, pulses—and somehow expects you to keep up right along with it.

What does it mean to transition from Individual Person to New Mom? To assess within ourselves what it means to be totally transformed by love and responsibility is a great task. It’s hard to even remember what you thought about before diapers and teething and sleep regressions consumed your life.

We get so wrapped up in observing every little transformation our newborn goes through, we often miss the one happening within ourselves. Each day we watch them grow and develop, but you’re both blooming. You are opening yourself up to a whole new world of sensations, thoughts, and emotions. We feel things we’ve never felt before. We think about things in a totally new perspective. We see the world through a different lens. We are expanding in 10 different directions every day.

Sometimes we think about the person we were before becoming a mom, and we miss her. But motherhood changes everything. Even though you may miss components of who you “used” to be, there’s no greater transformation than the person you are now.