The Broken Mirror
Part two of a series on what it actually felt like to go back to work after becoming a mother
Nobody tells you what the masking feels like from the inside.
It doesn’t feel like lying, exactly. It feels more like arrangement. Like every morning you gather the pieces of yourself — the tired ones, the leaking ones, the ones that cried in the car — and you find a way to make them hold a shape that looks like the person you used to be. Sharp. Capable. Fine.
You hang the mirror back up.
You smile at it.
You go to work.
There was a moment, every single morning, that I have never said out loud.
The moment I dropped my son off at daycare and walked back to my (home) office.
It was exhilaration. Pure, flooding, involuntary relief — this cranky ball of tears is someone else’s to contend with now, I am free — and it hit me so fast and so completely that for a split second I just felt it. Before I could stop myself.
And then the tsunami came.
Guilt so heavy it had a physical weight. Rage — at myself, at the situation, at the fact that I had just felt free from my own child. Exhaustion underneath all of it, the kind that lives in your bones and doesn’t respond to sleep. And judgment, pressing in from every direction: the perceived looks, the imagined commentary, the voice in my own head that knew exactly how to find the sorest place and press.
What kind of mother feels relieved to leave her baby?
I would jog-walk across the street. I would walk the mile home. I would log into Zoom smiling.
I have since learned there’s a name for the pattern I was living inside. It’s called the drama triangle — a way of understanding how we cycle through three roles when we’re in pain and don’t know what to do with it: victim, hero, persecutor.
I was spinning through all three. Sometimes within the same hour.
As the victim: I was someone who had fundamentally changed, and no one at work could see it. No one had language for it. No one knew how to hold the new version of me, so I held her myself, alone, in a place where she wasn’t supposed to exist.
As the hero: I had to fix this. Not just for me — for every mother who would come after me. I invented transition protocols. I advocated. I documented. I made myself useful to my own erasure.
As the persecutor: I turned on myself. The men have no problem. What is wrong with you? Why can’t you handle this? Why do you dread the weekends? Why do you hate solo-parenting more than you hate the job that’s breaking you?
The triangle kept spinning. I kept spinning with it.
The weekends were their own kind of impossible.
Everyone assumes the hard part is work. The performance, the meetings, the pumping schedule, the email from the boss. And yes. But weekends were supposed to be the relief — the time with my son, the restoration, the thing that made it all worth it.
Instead I dreaded them.
Not because I didn’t love him. But because solo-parenting a baby, on no sleep, with no separation and nowhere to put any of what I was carrying — was a different kind of hard. Not the hard of performing. The hard of having nothing left and still needing to show up fully for someone who needed everything.
I couldn’t say that to anyone.
So I shoved it down. Deeper and deeper, into my pelvic bowl — that place in the body where women are so good at storing the things they cannot yet name. It was full. It was bursting at the seams. And still I packed more in: the exhale, the guilt, the triangle, the weekends, the mirror, the pieces.
It seeped, of course. Into every interaction. Into the way I answered emails. Into the tightness around my eyes in meetings. Into the way I laughed a beat too late at things that weren’t funny.
But the mirror was hanging on the wall.
And I kept smiling at it.
Even as the reflection behind the glass was fracturing — quietly, slowly, a piece at a time. Bleeding. Sobbing. Disintegrating.
Even as the shards fell.
This is what living inside the gap looks like. Not a breakdown. Not a dramatic unraveling. Just a slow accumulation of weight in a place you can’t point to. A mirror held together with tape and will and the fear of being seen as someone who couldn’t handle it.
The pieces keep falling. And for a long time, you keep picking them up.
In part three: what it means when you finally stop.