What Happens When Two Versions of You Are Being Born At Once?

A conversation with a friend sent me down a rabbit hole this week.

Which, if you’ve been here for any length of time, you’ll know is usually how these chapters begin.

We were talking about carers.

My friend works with people and families affected by brain injuries, and our conversation turned to the person doing the caring.

The wife. The daughter. The mother. The person whose life changes too, even though she isn’t the one who is ill.

We talked about how much carers take on. How quickly the roles inside a relationship can change. How somebody can still be a wife, while simultaneously becoming a carer, an advocate, an organiser, a researcher, sometimes the main income provider, often without ever consciously choosing any of those identities.

And it got me thinking: what happens to your sense of self when life asks you to become more than one new version of yourself at the same time?

What happens when multiple life transitions collide?

That question led me to Kate Garraway.

When Wife Becomes Carer

In March 2020, Kate’s husband, Derek Draper, became critically ill with Covid.

What followed wasn’t a single event with a neat beginning and end. Derek spent months in hospital and later returned home requiring round-the-clock care.

Kate was still his wife, but she was also becoming his carer. She was still a mother. She was still a broadcaster. She was working, providing, advocating and navigating medical systems, all while trying to hold family life together.

Kate was living with extraordinary uncertainty about what the future might look like. There was no date she could circle in a diary and say, this is when this part of our lives will end.

And I think that’s the part I couldn’t stop thinking about. Because an identity hadn’t simply changed, an identity had collided with another identity.

Wife and carer.

Partner and advocate.

Mother and provider.

Hope and grief.

All existing at once.

And once I saw it there, I started seeing it everywhere.

Beginning And Ending Can Happen At The Same Time

I thought about my cousin.

She was pregnant while her husband was battling cancer for the second time.

Just sit with that for a second.

Her body was preparing to bring a new life into the world while another part of her was having to face the reality of losing the person she had built her life with.

Birth and death.

Beginning and ending.

Mother and carer.

Hope and anticipatory grief.

We often talk about life transitions as though they arrive politely one at a time. You become a mother, then you adjust. You experience grief, then you process it. Your relationship changes, then you work out who you are afterwards.

But life doesn’t always give us an afterwards before something else begins. Sometimes the chapters overlap. Sometimes one identity is still forming while another is being dismantled.

Sometimes two versions of you are being born at exactly the same time.

I Was Becoming An Adult While Learning How To Live Without My Brother

And then, inevitably, this rabbit hole brought me back to my own life.

I was 19 when my younger brother Will died suddenly. He was 17.

There was no period of anticipatory grief for me. No gradual understanding that our lives were going to change.

One moment I had a brother. And then I didn’t.

For a long time, I understood that experience almost entirely through the language of grief. Of course I did. But now I wonder whether that was only part of what was happening, because at 19, I wasn’t a finished version of myself to whom grief simply happened.

I was still becoming.

Late adolescence and early adulthood are periods of enormous development. The brain continues to mature and refine into our twenties. Our identity, independence, relationships, beliefs and understanding of the world are still being formed. And right in the middle of that process, mine collided with something enormous.

Loss.

I wasn’t only learning how to live without Will. I was learning how to be an adult at the same time.

Which makes me wonder how much of the woman I became was shaped not simply by grief, but by grieving while I was still becoming an adult.

At 19, one version of me was already naturally beginning to fall away. I was moving out of adolescence, discovering who I was, what I believed, how I wanted to live and what kind of woman I might become.

But while that identity was still forming, another was being formed alongside it: the version of me learning how to live without my brother. Those two transitions didn’t happen separately.

The adult woman I was naturally becoming and the grieving sister I now had no choice but to become, were being shaped alongside one another.

And so, maybe we can’t neatly separate the transition from the person who is living through it, because the person herself is changing too.

Our Bodies Don’t Wait For Life To Calm Down

This becomes even more interesting when you look at what is happening physiologically.

We sometimes talk about identity as though it’s purely psychological. A story we tell ourselves about who we are. But we’re living inside bodies that are changing too.

Pregnancy and matrescence bring significant hormonal, physiological, neurological and social change. Motherhood isn’t simply the addition of a baby to an otherwise unchanged woman. The woman herself is undergoing a transition.

Later, perimenopause and menopause can bring another significant period of change, as shifting hormones affect both the brain and the body.

But life doesn’t politely wait for those transitions to finish.

A woman going through perimenopause might also be caring for an ageing parent, watching her children leave home, navigating changes in her relationship or questioning a career she has spent decades building.

A new mother might be adjusting to an entirely new identity while also experiencing relationship changes, financial pressure, returning to work or becoming a carer herself.

Her body can be changing at the exact same time as her life is changing around her.

And I think that’s important, because life isn’t happening to a psychologically fixed woman. Her body is responding. Her brain is adapting. Her relationships are changing. Her environment may be changing. Her responsibilities may be changing. And her understanding of who she is may be changing alongside all of it.

Sometimes several of those things are happening at once.

So no wonder she doesn’t recognise herself.

What Happens When The Role Disappears?

I came back to Kate again.

Because there is another transition hidden inside caring that we don’t talk about enough. What happens when it ends?

After Derek died in January 2024, Kate spoke about caring for him as an honour and a privilege, and she said something that stopped me: “I wish I was caring today”.

Of course, that sentence speaks first and foremost to missing the person she loved, but it also made me think about identity.

For four years, so much of her life had been organised around caring; appointments, decisions, advocacy, work, children, finances, medical care and keeping life moving. And then the role that had demanded so much of her disappeared.

The person is gone. But so is a version of the life you had built around loving them.

Who are you when a role you never asked for becomes part of your identity and then suddenly isn’t yours anymore?

There can be grief inside grief. Not because you wanted the circumstances, but because human beings adapt. We build lives around what life asks of us and when those structures disappear, sometimes we have to meet ourselves again.

“Are You Mom?”

While researching this, I came across another woman whose story stayed with me. Kelly Cervantes.

Kelly’s daughter Adelaide developed severe epilepsy and was later diagnosed with a fatal neurodegenerative condition. As her daughter’s needs increased, Kelly stepped away from work and became her full-time carer.

She later wrote about something deceptively small that captured a much bigger loss of identity. In medical settings, people stopped using her name. She became, ‘Mom’.

She loved being Adelaide’s mother, but she was also watching other parts of herself disappear beneath the demands of caring. Her career, her independence, her sense of purpose outside the medical world.

Her daughter died in 2019, before her fourth birthday.

And once again, the transition didn’t simply end when the caring did. There was another threshold waiting; Who are you after spending years organising your life around keeping someone else safe?

Who are you when the identity you built to survive one chapter no longer fits the next?

Kelly has since written about grief, purpose, identity and finding a way forward. Not by pretending the previous version of herself never existed, but by learning how to carry her with her.

Maybe we’ve been asking the wrong question

The more I researched, the more I realised how often we separate women’s experiences into neat categories.

Motherhood.

Grief.

Menopause.

Divorce.

Caring.

Career change.

Illness.

Empty nest.

Relationship breakdown.

As though a woman walks through one transition, closes the door behind her and then politely waits for the next one to begin.

But women don’t experience their lives in separate books, Sometimes the chapters happen at the same time.

A woman can become a mother while grieving her own mother.

She can be perimenopausal while her marriage is ending.

She can become a carer while trying to build a career.

She can be experiencing enormous professional success while privately questioning everything about who she is.

She can be deeply grateful for one part of her life while grieving another.

She can be beginning and ending at the same time.

And maybe that is why some periods of our lives feel so extraordinarily disorientating.

We’re trying to answer, who am I now?When there isn’t one answer. There might be five.

Maybe This Is The Middle We’re Actually Trying To Hold

We keep asking women what they’re going through as though there can only be one answer.

Motherhood or grief.

Menopause or divorce.

Carer or wife.

Beginning or ending.

But what if the answer is both? What if she’s living through several endings and beginnings at exactly the same time?

What if she isn’t lost at all? What if she is simply standing in the middle of several versions of herself?

I think we’re very quick to ask women what they need to do next. Which decision are you going to make? Which direction are you going in? How are you going to get yourself back?

But perhaps there’s something that needs to happen before any of that. Understanding.

Understanding what is changing.

Understanding what she has been carrying.

Understanding which identities were chosen and which were handed to her by circumstance.

Understanding what her body has been navigating alongside her mind.

Understanding that conflicting emotions do not necessarily mean she is confused.

Understanding that several truths can exist at once.

Maybe she doesn’t need us to decide which transition matters most. Maybe she needs somewhere capable of holding all of her while she is in the middle of them.

Because if you’re grieving and mothering and caring and working and changing and questioning and becoming all at once… Of course you don’t recognise yourself.

Look at everything you’re in the process of becoming.

That deserves understanding.

That deserves appreciation.

And perhaps, more than anything, it deserves compassion for the woman carrying all of it.

Maybe instead of asking why you’re not coping like the woman you used to be, it’s time to recognise everything the woman you’re becoming is already carrying.

With warmth,

Becky

Founder & Editor, Becoming Her

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