There is a moment, somewhere in the early weeks or months of motherhood, when a woman catches sight of herself in the mirror and does not entirely recognize the person looking back. The face is familiar enough, more tired perhaps, softer or sharper than before, but something behind the eyes has shifted in a way she cannot name. She has the strange sense of being both more herself than ever and a complete stranger at the same time. She loves her baby with a ferocity that frightens her, and she also grieves something she cannot quite put words to, and she wonders, in the quiet of a three in the morning feeding, whether she will ever feel like herself again, or whether that self is simply gone.
If you have stood in front of that mirror, I want you to know two things straight away. You are not losing your mind, and you are not failing at motherhood. You are in the middle of one of the most profound developmental transformations a human being can undergo, a passage so total that it remakes your body, your brain, your relationships, your sense of time, and your very identity. It has a name, though hardly anyone is given it, and learning that name can be the beginning of feeling less alone in the unraveling. The name is matrescence, and this is a piece about what it actually is, why no one prepared you for it, and why the woman in the middle of it deserves to be seen exactly as she is, rather than asked to wait until she has put herself back together.
The Word We Were Never Given
We have a word for the upheaval of becoming a teenager. We call it adolescence, and we understand it as a recognized developmental stage, a turbulent in-between where the body morphs and the hormones surge and the whole self reorganizes around a new identity. We give adolescents grace for it. We expect the moodiness and the disorientation and the slow, awkward becoming, because we have a framework that tells us this is a passage and not a personal failure. Becoming a mother is every bit as demanding and transformative as becoming a teenager, and yet most women are never handed the word that would let them understand it the same way.
That word is matrescence. It was coined in 1973 by the medical anthropologist Dana Raphael, who recognized that the transition into motherhood is a true rite of passage, a time when a woman’s body, her status, her emotional life, her daily focus, her relationships, and her own identity all shift at once. For decades the term sat largely forgotten, until the clinical psychologist Aurélie Athan at Teachers College, Columbia, revived it for our era and brought it into the conversation about maternal mental health. More recently the reproductive psychiatrist Alexandra Sacks has carried it to a wider audience, drawing the parallel to adolescence explicitly and insisting that the disorientation of new motherhood is a normal developmental experience rather than a sign that something has gone wrong.
I find that simply naming it brings many women to tears, and I understand why. When you have no word for what is happening to you, you are left to assume the problem is you, that other mothers are managing some seamless transformation while you alone are coming undone. To learn that there is a name, that this is a known and studied passage with a shape and a logic, is to be handed back your own sanity. You are not uniquely broken. You are in matrescence, and matrescence is supposed to feel like this.
Birth as Descent
Long before I had the language of developmental psychology, I had the language of myth, and the two tell the same story about this threshold. The deep feminine traditions understand that real transformation does not happen by rising up into the light but by going down into the dark, and there is no more literal enactment of that descent than birth itself. No one ascends into motherhood. You go down, down into the deepening grip of labor, down past every idea you ever held of yourself, down to a threshold where life and death stand close enough to touch, and you travel all the way to the floor of your own body and back again.
What the myths know, and what our tidy cultural story of motherhood hides, is that you do not return from that descent as the same woman who went in. Something ends down there. The maiden you were, the self who organized her life around her own becoming, dies in the passage, and a mother is born in her place. This is not a metaphor stretched for effect. It is the felt reality so many women report and so few feel permitted to speak, the sense that an entire former self has been left behind in the underworld of birth, mourned even as the new life is adored. If you want to follow that thread all the way down, I wrote about the descent to the dark mother and the old goddess myths of dying and being remade, because matrescence is, at its root, an initiation, and initiation always asks for a death before it gives a birth.
The Body Remade
We are handed such a soft and sanitized version of all this, a glow, a bump, a bundle, and almost no one prepares a woman for the sheer animal embodiment of what her body actually moves through. There is the blood and the water, the milk that comes in whether you are ready or not, the body that leaks and aches and opens and refuses to be willed back into composure. For months you live entirely in the flesh, in a body remade from the inside out, stretched and softened and scarred and rearranged into something that will never again be quite the body you had before.
The changes are not only on the surface, either, and this is where the science is genuinely astonishing. Researchers studying the maternal brain have found that pregnancy and new motherhood reshape its very architecture, pruning and reorganizing neural pathways in ways that persist for years, much as the adolescent brain is remodeled. Your body is not malfunctioning when it feels foreign to you. It is doing exactly what a body in the midst of matrescence does, which is to physically become the body of a mother, a transformation as real and as structural as any your body has undergone since you yourself were a teenager. The strangeness you feel in your own skin is not vanity or weakness. It is the felt experience of being rebuilt.
The Grief and the Love in the Same Breath
Here is the part almost no one says out loud, and the part that frees women most when it is finally spoken. You can love your child with your whole being and grieve your former life at the very same time, and the two feelings can arrive in the same breath, impossible to pull apart. You can look at your sleeping baby and feel your heart crack open with a tenderness you did not know you were capable of. Then, an hour later feel a wave of longing for the woman you used to be, the one with uninterrupted thoughts and a body that belonged only to her, and feel monstrous for the longing. You are not monstrous. You are ambivalent, and ambivalence, as Alexandra Sacks has spent her career explaining, is a hallmark of motherhood and a perfectly natural response to an experience this complex.
The cultural myth of the perfect mother tells us that good mothers feel only one thing, a pure and uncomplicated bliss, and that any other feeling is evidence of a defect in our love. This is a lie, and it is a cruel one, because it isolates women in shame at the precise moment they most need companionship. Feeling exhaustion alongside devotion, frustration alongside tenderness, regret alongside fierce protective love, none of this makes you a bad mother. It makes you a human being undergoing an enormous transition, holding more conflicting truths at once than the human heart was ever really built to hold. The push and the pull, the wanting to be close and the wanting to flee, are not signs that you love your child too little. They are the normal weather of a self being reorganized around an entirely new center.
The Loneliness of a Transformation No One Names
One of the hardest things about matrescence is how alone it can feel, and the loneliness is made worse precisely because we have no shared language for it. A woman in the thick of it looks around and sees other mothers who appear to be managing beautifully, posting their soft-lit moments and their milestones, and she concludes that she is the only one struggling to recognize her own life. She does not realize that nearly everyone around her is performing the same composure over the same hidden upheaval, that the seamless motherhood she is comparing herself to does not actually exist, and that the woman next to her at the playground may be white-knuckling her own descent in exactly the same silence.
We have stripped the rites and the village from this passage, and the cost lands squarely on the individual mother. In older and more communal cultures, the postpartum months were held as a time apart, with the new mother tended, fed, and surrounded, her transformation witnessed and supported by women who had walked it before her. Most of us move through matrescence with none of that, often physically isolated, expected to be back to ourselves and back to productivity within weeks, carrying a transformation of this magnitude almost entirely on our own. The isolation is not a personal failing. It is a feature of how our culture has abandoned mothers in the middle of the most demanding passage of their lives, and naming that honestly is part of refusing it.
This Is Not a Sign That Something Is Wrong
I want to be careful and clear here, because it matters. Matrescence is a normal developmental transition, not a disorder, and the disorientation, the ambivalence, the grief, and the strangeness are all part of its ordinary shape. Understanding that can lift an enormous weight of shame, the fear that your struggle means you are broken or that you love your child wrongly. You are not broken. You are becoming, and becoming is hard.
And, in the same breath, I want to say this with equal clarity. There is a difference between the natural difficulty of matrescence and the heavier weather of postpartum depression or anxiety, and that difference is worth knowing. If the sadness has become a fog that does not lift, if the anxiety is relentless, if you find yourself unable to sleep even when the baby sleeps, unable to feel anything at all, or frightened by your own thoughts, that is not a failure either, and it is not something to push through alone. It is a sign that you deserve real support, and reaching for it is one of the most loving things a mother can do, for herself and for her child. Naming matrescence is not about minimizing genuine suffering. It is about making sure no woman mistakes a normal transformation for a personal flaw, and no woman mistakes a treatable struggle for something she simply has to endure.
The Slow Becoming
The promise hidden inside all of this is that matrescence does not end where it begins, in the rawest disorientation, but moves, slowly, toward something. You do not, in the end, get your old self back, and I have come to believe that this is not the tragedy it first appears to be. The maiden does not return, but the woman who emerges from this passage is not lesser for her absence. She is larger. She has been broken open and remade with new capacities, a fierceness she did not have before, a tenderness that reaches places in her that were never touched, a knowledge of her own depths that only the descent could give.
This is the truth our culture’s obsession with bouncing back keeps us from seeing. We are told the goal of the postpartum months is to recover, to get our bodies and our selves back to how they were, as though the whole experience were a detour from real life rather than a fundamental becoming. But you are not meant to go back. You are meant to integrate, to gather up the woman you were and the mother you are becoming into a self that is wider than either, the way every initiation gathers what was scattered and sings it back into a new wholeness. Matrescence, like adolescence, is not a problem to be solved. It is a passage to be moved through, and the woman waiting on the other side of it is someone you have not met yet, and someone worth becoming.
To Be Seen in the Middle of It
I do the work I do because I believe the woman in the middle of this passage deserves to be witnessed, and not after she has lost the weight or slept through the night or finally feels like herself again, but right now, in the rawest and most unrecognizable season of her becoming. There is a quiet cruelty in the message that a mother should hide until she has put herself back together, that she should stay behind the camera and out of the frame until she is once again someone she deems worth photographing. The truth is that this version of you, tender and exhausted and cracked open and remade, is not a version to be ashamed of and edited out. It is one of the most profound and beautiful chapters of your entire life, and it is passing even now.
When a mother comes to me in the thick of matrescence, I am not trying to photograph the woman she used to be or the woman she thinks she should be once she has recovered. I am trying to witness the woman she actually is, in the middle of her transformation, held with reverence rather than asked to perform a wholeness she does not yet feel. The images that come from that kind of seeing are not a record of how she looked on a tidy afternoon. They are proof that she was here, that she was becoming, that even in the season she felt most lost she was loved and seen and entirely worthy of being kept. One day she will look back at those photographs and recognize, with a tenderness she could not access while she was inside it, the holy and difficult passage she was moving through, and the strong and tender woman she was becoming all along.
When you are ready to be witnessed exactly where you are in your becoming, on Whidbey Island, Seattle, or beyond, you can reach out below.
