The natural state of motherhood is unselfishness. When you become a mother, you are no longer the center of your own universe. You relinquish that position to your children.
The thing with psychoanalysis is I know basically what happened in my childhood. I know where things went wrong and I know what my mother said at one point and what my father said at one point.
So much of my sense of who I am is tied to mothering. When they left home, I fell into a huge, empty, black hole. Your children are grown and your career has slowed down - all the stuff that took up so much attention is gone, and you're left with expansive time and space.
The only place I've felt was really my home is my cabin up north. There's something in the water there that connects me to that place. There's also this sense of isolation and loneliness about it that I've never been able to shake.