Welcome to Your New Name

A few weeks after maternity leave ended with my first-born child, I was still adjusting to the new routine of dropping my son off for daycare. One day, as I entered my daycare provider’s home, I set my son’s infant carrier down and handed off the diaper bag to his caregiver Gayle. 

From inside the doorway, a preschooler’s tiny voice piped up, “Hey, Jack’s mom? Wanna see my new book?” My first thought was, Is that kid talking to ME? Gayle, a 20-year daycare veteran,  grinned and said, “Hi, ‘Jack’s Mom,’ welcome to your new name.” 

This memory stays with me as a powerful reminder of how identity shifts over time to accommodate an ever-changing series of roles, responsibilities and expectations. Suddenly, I was Someone’s Mom, not even given my own moniker to lay claim to. It was amusing, but also bewildering. For 11 years, I had lived as “Jennifer V. Miller” and for 26 years prior to that, I had lived as a child, teen, and then single woman with my own name, my identity solidly intact.

Moments like this happen more often than we realize. Not as major milestones, but as unheralded crossings. A move to a new city. The first day in a role you’re not sure you’ve grown into yet. The moment a parent begins to depend on you instead of the other way around. You can still see the life you came from, and you can sense something ahead—but right in the middle, you’re just trying to find your footing.

And often, it’s disorienting, like standing in the doorway of a new classroom, the “new kid” who’s moved to town. Sure, there’s all the logistical stuff like where to go, what to say, remembering new rules and norms. But the challenge isn’t entirely logistical, it’s emotional too. Because while you’re navigating the change, you’re also trying to make sense of who you are within the change. 

Here’s what years of ever-evolving roles have taught me: the most meaningful parts of our life story often live in the space between who we were and who we are becoming. 

Maybe that’s why this memory stays with me. Because that was a pivotal moment in my identity as a mother. When I look back now, I see that day at Gayle’s home as part of a larger arc in my life—not just a passing interaction, but the beginnings of comfort with a new identity. There was the “before,” when I was simply Jennifer. There was the “after,” when being someone’s mother became inseparable from who I am. And in between was that funny, disquieting moment in a doorway, when my life story added a meaningful new chapter.

The most meaningful parts of our life story often live in the space between who we were and who we are becoming. 

When a three-year-old named me as “Jack’s mom,” it momentarily separated me from my primary identity thus far: Jennifer. I mean, of course I knew I was a mom, but to have my son’s name centered as my identity was jarring. OK, so I guess I’m really in this “mom” thing now, was my first thought. 

And then I smiled. Yes, I am Jack’s mom. And I will always be Jack’s mom.

But I’m also still Jennifer.

That moment didn’t replace who I had been—it added to it. It stretched my identity to hold something new. And over time, I’ve come to see that this is how our lives unfold: not by leaving one version of ourselves behind, but by carrying each one forward, weaving them into the person we are always becoming.