SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2026 Hawaii Parent 149 once went to a dinner party and introduced myself as a mom of three. The woman I was talking to laughed and asked me my name. I also laughed it off in the moment, but it stuck with me later. I had a name. I had answered a simple question with my job title, except it wasn’t even a job title; it was just the role that had quietly taken over every other way I used to describe myself. Somewhere around week two of parenthood, most of us get a new name. Not a nickname—a role. Mom. Dad. Caregiver. And somewhere in the chaos of feedings and laundry and never quite finishing a sentence, it’s easy to let that role quietly replace everything else you used to be. Nobody tells you this part out loud, but it happens to almost everyone: you stop introducing yourself as a person with interests and start introducing yourself as someone’s parent. And it’s not that being a parent isn’t a real, enormous, worthy identity—it is. The problem is when it becomes the only one. The Identity You Don’t Choose to Lose Identity isn’t something that vanishes the moment a baby arrives. It gets buried, one decision at a time, under things that all feel urgent and none of which feel optional. You skip the workI
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