After the Diapers

There comes a morning when the fog lifts — when the children finally sleep, the endless demands ease, and a little space returns to your mind — and into that space comes a question you have not had room to ask in years: who am I now?

Warm, honest, and hopeful, After the Diapers is a companion for the woman surfacing from the all-consuming baby years into a life with room in it again, and finding herself, to her surprise, a bit of a stranger. It names the disorientation no one warns you about, the quiet grief woven through the relief, and the exhilarating, daunting truth that a whole second act is opening before you.

Across thirteen encouraging chapters, Susan Callahan helps you reconnect with the woman you were before, reclaim the self you set aside, and go forward, not back, into a fuller life. She takes on the return to work, the reclaiming of your own body, the reconnection with a partner after the trenches, the rebuilding of friendship, and the relearning of your own wanting — all the threads of a self that got folded away, waiting to be unfolded again.

For every mother who has looked up from the diapers and wondered where she went, this is a map back to herself, and forward into the expansive years ahead.