Article: When the Party Girl Becomes the Mom
When the Party Girl Becomes the Mom
How to stop believing that becoming a mom means erasing the woman you were.
No one tells you how much grief is baked into joy.
You think the fear of becoming a mother is about labor, or responsibility, or whether you’ll ever sleep again.
But the real fear—at least for me—was that motherhood would erase the version of me I’d worked so hard to inhabit: the party girl.
The party girl was armor and performance, but also freedom.
She was the one who said yes to everything—the last-minute trips, the martinis on Tuesday, the bad ideas that became the best stories. She knew her worth was measured in proximity to chaos and glamour, in how late she could stay out, in how many people wanted her name in their phone.
There was a power in it, even when it left me empty.
So of course, stepping into motherhood felt like losing that power.
Overnight, the same girl who danced barefoot at the Chateau Marmont was expected to know which bottle nipples reduce colic. The adrenaline that used to come from a room full of strangers’ attention now had to be replaced with the patient, invisible adrenaline of soothing a baby back to sleep at 3 a.m. It is a dizzying exchange, one currency of identity swapped for another.
What makes it terrifying isn’t just the loss of freedom, it’s the loss of witness. Being a party girl meant people saw me. Being a mom, at least at first, meant disappearing into domesticity. You become the background of your child’s life. No one claps when you make it through the witching hour without crying. No one posts a picture of you in the Target parking lot with spit-up on your shirt.And then there’s the shame: the fear that if you admit you miss the party girl, you’re admitting you don’t love your kid enough. As if nostalgia cancels out devotion. As if a longing for the past is a betrayal of the present.
The truth is, both selves live in me. The party girl taught me how to chase life, how to stretch a night into story.
Motherhood is teaching me something deeper—how to hold still, how to notice the quiet beauty threaded through the small and the ordinary. I don’t have to kill off one to keep the other. I can carry both, but right now, motherhood takes precedence. She gets the front row, the loudest voice, the seat at the table. The party girl is still here. just softer, waiting for the rare nights she’s called on—but my daughter comes first.
The scariest part isn’t losing who I was.
It’s learning how to integrate her, how to honor the girl who lived on dirty dance floors and late-night drives while showing up for the girl who now lives in the soft hours of dawn with a toddler’s hand tugging at hers.
The party girl and the mom both want the same thing, really: to feel alive, to feel seen, to know that their story matters.
The fear comes from thinking one has to die for the other to live. The relief comes from realizing she doesn’t.
