Matrescence: The Transformation of Becoming a Mother

I recently learned a new word.

Matrescence: the developmental transition into motherhood.

What feels so powerful about this word is that it gives language to a transformational experience many people go through, yet struggle to explain.

Anthropologist Dana Raphael introduced the term in the 1970s, and in more recent years, reproductive health psychologist and researcher Dr. Aurelie Athan has helped bring renewed attention to the concept.

Matrescence reshapes identity, relationships, emotions, needs, priorities, and ways of moving through the world.

The mother is becoming too.

And that becoming can begin long before a baby arrives.

For some people, matrescence also includes experiences around abortion, which can carry many different meanings and emotions.

Some people become mothers suddenly.
Some gradually.
Some biologically.
Some relationally.
Some through caregiving, love, loss, impossible decisions, or dreams that never fully arrive and still change them forever.

Some carry a child in their arms.
Some in their hearts.
Some in memory.

No matter the path, experiences around motherhood often leave people changed.

Never entirely the same person they were before.

Many parts of matrescence aren’t linear, easily recognized, or openly spoken about.

Although there’s a lot of focus on the development of children, there's rarely much acknowledgment of the development of mothers.

Motherhood can bring love, awe, meaning, tenderness, grief, exhaustion, and loneliness, all in a tangled mixture of feelings that don’t seem like they would exist together, yet somehow do.

There’s so much pressure in dominant Western culture to appear grateful, capable, nurturing, emotionally steady, and fulfilled by every aspect of being a mother that many moms feel isolated in the very human complexity of their experience.

Not because those experiences are rare.
But because mothers are often expected to carry them alone while continuing to care for everyone else.

“Everyone wants to hold the baby, who will hold the mother?” ~ Jabina Coleman, LCSW, IBCLC

That profound question comes from Jabina Coleman, reproductive psychotherapist and consultant advancing maternal and infant health equity.

It speaks to the reality that mothers are often expected to hold everyone else together while receiving very little holding themselves.

Motherhood isn’t always or only beautiful.

It’s also demanding, asking for extraordinary amounts of emotional, physical, relational, and psychological energy.

Many mothers are expected to move through one of the most life-altering human transitions while receiving far less care, support, rest, community, and emotional holding than they actually need.

And if support appears, it might arrive intensely in the first days or weeks after birth.

Soon, much of it vanishes.

Meanwhile, motherhood keeps changing shape.

Reminders of loss.
Infancy.
Toddlerhood.
School age.
Adolescence.
Launching.
Adult children.
Being needed differently.
Being needed less.
Letting go.
Reorganizing again and again as children grow and change through different stages of life, regardless of age.

So many mothers find themselves wondering:

How come nobody told me about this part?

Motherhood is often treated like something we’re simply supposed to absorb, adapt to, and carry gracefully no matter how overwhelming it becomes and regardless of how little support we have.

We can carry some degree of aloneness, even with others nearby.
If you know, you know.

Motherhood isn’t a sprint.
It’s an endurance experience.
And yet, something more like a relay race would be far more humane and supportive.

As psychiatrist Dr. Alexandra Sacks says in her TED Talk:
“When a baby is born, so is a mother, each unsteady in their own way. Matrescence is profound, but it’s also hard, and that’s what makes it human.”

Maybe that’s part of what mothers need most:
not pressure to become perfect,
but support while becoming someone new over and over.

Because mothering is far too much for anyone to carry alone.