by Kat Gang
The first time I zipped myself back into a floor-length gown, it felt strangely theatrical.
Not because I was about to walk onstage. I had done that hundreds of times before.
It was because, for nearly a decade, my body had belonged to other people.
For years, it had been a landscape of pregnancy, nursing, carrying sleeping children from the car, crouching to tie tiny shoes, wiping tiny butts, balancing toddlers on one hip while stirring Kraft Mac and cheese with the other hand. My closet reflected that life: washable fabrics, nursing tops, practical shoes, pockets full of snacks and Band-Aids. Sequins gave way to spit-up cloths. High heels became sneakers.
I had waited a long time to have children. By the time they arrived, I had already spent nearly twenty years building the career I had dreamed about. I was singing jazz in New York, performing the music I loved with musicians I admired. How amazing is that?! I wasn’t leaving because I had failed to establish myself. I left because I had accomplished the one thing that mattered enough to make me willingly step away.
I wanted to be there.
Not everyone has that choice. Many mothers return to work almost immediately because they have to. Others discover that their salary barely covers the cost of full-time childcare. In America, motherhood often feels like a logistical puzzle solved through impossible arithmetic. But I’m not here to linger on the failures of American childcare or gender equity. Every family does what it must.
For me, the answer was to become a stay-at-home mother.
And I loved it.
That part often surprises people.
The story is supposed to be about me losing myself. But the truth is, I found something extraordinary in those years. I learned a slower rhythm. I memorized bedtime stories. I spent entire mornings watching toddlers become people. I don’t wish any of it away. Yes, it is a daily grind of impossibly long hours and days, and sleepless nights with interrupted dreams.
But motherhood asks for something profound.
It asks you to become, for a while, almost entirely necessary to someone else.
The babies don’t care that you once sang French chansons in Manhattan. They don’t care that strangers applauded your solos or that your name appeared on a marquee. They need milk. Dry pajamas. Another reading of Goodnight Moon. They need someone whose attention is so complete that she forgets where she put her own.
And gradually, almost invisibly, you do.
Your identity doesn’t disappear all at once. It dissolves.
Not because anyone takes it from you, but because every day you willingly hand over another little piece. Mothers do this constantly. We become experts at anticipating everyone else’s needs before our own. It’s an act of devotion, but it comes with a quiet cost. Somewhere beneath the schedules, the permission slips, the endless laundry, the woman who once existed independently begins to feel oddly fictional.
Then one day the children don’t need you quite so urgently.
They buckle their own seat belts. They disappear into birthday parties without looking back. They pour their own cereal. (Which is still a marvel I never cease to appreciate)!
And suddenly there is air.
That was exactly when another transition arrived to complicate everything: perimenopause.
No one prepares you for the strange emotional collision of those years. Your children are becoming more independent just as your own body begins changing in ways you don’t recognize. Hormones rearrange your confidence. Your emotions swing wildly between gratitude and grief. You find yourself asking questions that sound almost adolescent: Who am I now? What do I want? What still belongs to me?
The answer surprised me.
I missed singing.
Not because I wanted to escape motherhood, but because singing had never stopped being part of me. It had simply been waiting patiently beneath everything else.
When I found a regular jazz gig again, surrounded by generous, brilliant musicians, something unexpected happened.
I didn’t become my old self.
Thank goodness!
She was younger. She had fewer stretch marks and fewer gray hairs. She also knew almost nothing about sacrifice, patience, resilience, or the peculiar kind of joy that comes from hearing your child laugh from the next room.
What she also had was stamina.
No one warned me that returning to nightlife in my forties would feel less like slipping back into an old pair of heels and more like training for an endurance event. Jazz musicians keep odd hours. We don’t clock out at five. We finish the last set after most people are asleep, pack up, drive home with melodies still ringing in our ears, and finally crawl into bed somewhere around one in the morning.
Children, however, remain gloriously indifferent to your artistic schedule.
They still wake up at dawn needing breakfast, permission slips signed, lunches packed, missing sneakers located, and someone to admire a Lego creation before the school bus arrives. (Let’s be honest, on the mornings after gig nights we are usually rolling into circle drop off a little late).
For the first few months, I seriously wondered whether I had made a terrible mistake. I felt like the proverbial candle burning at both ends. I was in my forties, navigating perimenopause, singing until midnight, and then launching into the morning chaos of family life only a few hours later. It was exhilarating—and almost devastating.
But our bodies, like our hearts, are remarkably adaptable.
Eventually, I learned to protect my energy with the same care I protected my voice. I stopped pretending I could function the way I had in my twenties. I became strategic about rest, gentler with myself, and less interested in proving that I could do it all. The exhaustion didn’t disappear, but it became familiar, even meaningful. It was the fatigue that comes from building a life expansive enough to hold more than one version of yourself.
The woman who stepped back onto the stage was someone entirely new.
The heels fit differently now. Not to mention the dresses, most of which I had to ceremoniously pass on because my waist was no longer the same size or shape it used to be. I will never forget going through that triggeringly beautiful box of old dresses with my best mom friends and remembering each big performance I had worn them for. It was like flipping through a yearbook of dresses.
The gowns felt like they belonged to someone who had lived several lifetimes since she’d last worn them.
And when the lights came up and I opened my mouth to sing, I realized I hadn’t returned to my old life.
I had finally found a way to bring all of my lives together.
I wasn’t choosing between being a mother and being a musician.
For the first time, I was fully both.
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