This is so spot-on. Motherhood, for me personally, has been a tremendous rite of passage. It has been healing and transformative, while also being exhausting and often all-encompassing. Women who become moms gain new levels of identities, perspectives, and responsibilities. We must put our children’s lives and needs before our own, and parenting is an intensively grounding, wholesome, and rewarding, iterative journey. While parenthood and motherhood particularly is more than “just a job” and so strongly colors our new roles and identities, I also find it reductive when my identity becomes constrained to the role of mother. Women (and all parents) are multifaceted, complex beings, we are still individuals, and we still have identities and interests outside of parenthood. Our culture has a lot of maturing to do in how we tend to relate to parents and our identities.