140: Bouncing Back Myth, Invisible Grief & Identity Shift of Badass Moms with Jenna Kennedy
The Identity Shift Nobody Warns You About: Invisible Grief, the Bounce Back Myth & What It Really Means to Become a Mom
You've heard about the sleepless nights. The body changes. The logistics of keeping a tiny human alive. But nobody, nobody, sat you down and said: "By the way, the person you've spent your whole life building? You're going to have to let her go."
That's the conversation Tara had with entrepreneur, podcaster, and mom of two Jenna Kennedy in one of the most raw and necessary episodes of the Broads podcast yet. If you've ever felt like motherhood asked you to give up the most hard-won version of yourself, and then felt guilty for grieving her, this one's for you.
The "Bounce Back" Myth Is a Lie We Need to Stop Telling
Let's start with the phrase itself. Bounce back. Back to what, exactly?
The cultural obsession with new moms "bouncing back", to their pre-baby body, their pre-baby productivity, their pre-baby identity, assumes there's a fixed point to return to. But research shows that the neurological and psychological transformation of becoming a mother (called matrescence) rivals puberty and menopause in scale. Your brain is literally rewiring. Your priorities, values, and sense of self are being restructured at a cellular level.
You're not supposed to bounce back. You're supposed to become someone new.
Jenna talks about this honestly, the idea that motherhood isn't a detour from your real life, it's a complete dismantling and rebuilding of it. And the sooner we stop framing that as something to recover from, the sooner we can meet ourselves where we actually are.
The Grief Nobody Gives You Permission to Feel
Here's the thing about invisible grief: it's invisible because nobody validates it.
When Jenna got pregnant, unexpectedly, twice, she wasn't just navigating diapers and daycare. She was quietly mourning a version of herself she hadn't finished becoming yet. The driven, accomplished, in-control woman who had a plan. The one who knew exactly who she was.
That grief is real. But because there's no funeral for the pre-mom version of you, no casseroles from the neighbors, no cultural script that says it's okay to mourn this, most women bury it and call it something more acceptable. Anxiety. Burnout. Feeling "off."
Tara and Jenna get into why this grief gets so suppressed, especially for women who identify as high achievers. There's an unspoken pressure to be grateful, you wanted this, right? So why does it feel like a loss? The answer: because it is one. And acknowledging that doesn't make you a bad mom. It makes you an honest one.
Why High Achievers Have It Harder (Yes, Really)
If your whole identity was built around accomplishment, competence, and control, motherhood is going to hit you differently.
Jenna speaks directly to this, and it's something a lot of women in the Broads community will relate to: high achievers tend to conflate doing with being. As long as you're crushing goals, building things, and moving fast, you feel like yourself. Motherhood, especially in the early days, strips that away completely.
You can't optimize your way through a newborn. You can't hustle past the identity death. And for women who've never had to sit with uncertainty or "failure" before, that unraveling can feel catastrophic.
The insight here isn't that high-achieving women are broken, it's that the very skills that made them successful don't transfer. And learning to surrender, to slow down, to sit in the mess without fixing it? That's not weakness. That's the actual work.
Anxiety Is a Signal, Not a Problem to Solve
One of the most powerful reframes in this conversation: anxiety isn't the enemy.
For women navigating a major identity transition, anxiety often shows up loud and demanding. And the cultural response is to medicate it, manage it, push through it. But Jenna reframes anxiety as a signal, your nervous system alerting you that something meaningful is happening, that something is changing, that you need to pay attention.
That doesn't mean anxiety should run the show. It means it deserves to be listened to rather than immediately suppressed. When you ask what is this anxiety pointing to? instead of how do I make this stop?, you start getting real answers about where you are in your transition and what you actually need.
This is a huge shift for women who've been conditioned to optimize their way out of discomfort. Sometimes discomfort is information.
What Surrender Actually Looks Like for a Woman Who Always Had a Plan
"Surrender" is one of those words that can make a high-achieving woman's eye twitch. It sounds like giving up. It sounds passive. It sounds like the opposite of everything that's ever worked.
But the way Jenna describes it, surrender is one of the most active, courageous things a woman can do in the middle of a massive identity shift. It's not about abandoning your ambitions or shrinking yourself. It's about releasing your grip on who you were so you have space to meet who you're becoming.
Practically, it looks like stopping the comparison to your pre-mom self. It looks like letting small habits, movement, rest, a few minutes of quiet, do the quiet work of rebuilding happiness when big accomplishments aren't available as a source of fuel. It looks like recognizing that your most important role right now isn't your career title, your fitness goal, or your productivity output. It's this. And that's not a step backward, it's a different kind of leading.
The Takeaway: You're Not Falling Apart. You're Becoming.
If there's one thing to carry away from this conversation, it's this: the identity shift of motherhood is not a crisis to fix. It's a transformation to move through.
The grief is real. The disorientation is valid. The loss of your former self deserves acknowledgment, not minimization. And on the other side of that surrender is a version of you who is more grounded, more intentional, and more herself than she's ever been.
You're not bouncing back. You're building forward.
🎧 Listen to the full episode with Jenna Kennedy on the Broads podcast, and follow Jenna on Instagram @itsjennakennedy and check out her podcast Hope You're Well.
Are you in the thick of a motherhood identity shift right now, or have you come out the other side? Share your experience with the Broads community on Instagram @broads.app, we want to hear from you.
