There is a word for what you are feeling.
And the fact that you did not have it before is part of why it hurt so much.
The word is matrescence. It was originally coined by medical anthropologist Dana Raphael in 1975 and has been significantly expanded and brought into contemporary clinical practice by perinatal psychologist Dr. Aurelie Athan at Teachers College, Columbia University. It refers to the developmental passage a woman undergoes as she transitions through pre-conception, pregnancy, birth, and the months and years that follow — a passage that is biological, psychological, relational, and existential simultaneously, and that reshapes a woman's identity, her body, her relationships, her sense of purpose, and her understanding of time in ways that do not resolve quickly and do not follow a linear path.
The closest analogy in human development is adolescence. Like adolescence, matrescence involves hormonal upheaval, physical transformation, the renegotiation of every significant relationship, and a profound reorganisation of identity. Like adolescence, it is a transition from one developmental stage to another rather than a pathological event. And like adolescence, it is characterised by turbulence, ambivalence, grief, exhilaration, and an often uncomfortable coexistence of who you were and who you are becoming, which are not yet the same person and may not be for some time.
The difference between adolescence and matrescence is that we have, as a culture, built an enormous amount of infrastructure around the former. We have the language for it. We have the developmental framework. We have the cultural understanding that a teenager is in the middle of a significant identity transition, and that some degree of chaos and confusion is not only expected but developmentally appropriate. We have extended that same understanding to almost no aspect of the maternal transition. The result is that millions of women are navigating one of the most profound developmental passages of their lives without a name for what is happening to them, without a framework for understanding it, and without the cultural permission to find it difficult.
The Research That Names It
Of women experience significant emotional and identity changes in the first year of motherhood that extend well beyond the postpartum mood disorders the clinical system is trained to look for.
The Maternal Mental Health Leadership Alliance estimates that more than 80% of women experience significant emotional and identity changes in the first year of motherhood. That figure encompasses postpartum depression and anxiety, the clinical conditions that the maternal mental health system is primarily designed to detect and treat. But it also encompasses the much larger and less clinically categorised experience of matrescence itself: the grief for the self that existed before, the disorientation of no longer quite recognising the person in the mirror, the ambivalence about a role that is simultaneously the most meaningful thing you have ever done and the most confining, the rage that arrives without warning at the smallness of the life you are currently living relative to the vastness of the person you were before.
A 2025 paper published in Women's Health Issues argued that matrescence should be formally integrated into maternal and child health frameworks as a critical developmental period in its own right, one that has historically been ignored because the biomedical focus on pregnancy outcomes left the psychological transformation of the mother largely unaddressed. The paper is part of a growing body of academic and clinical literature pushing for a fundamental reframing of how we understand the maternal experience, away from the binary of either wellness or pathology and toward the more accurate and more useful framework of developmental passage.
Research published in Frontiers in Psychiatry in 2025 argues that the concept of matrescence represents a paradigm shift in how we understand maternal mental health, one that moves away from pathologising mothers' experiences and toward understanding them as developmentally expected. The bias toward clinical diagnosis in maternal mental health has meant that the normal, expected turbulence of matrescence is frequently treated as a disorder requiring medical intervention rather than a transition requiring support, community, and time.
What Matrescence Actually Involves
Understanding matrescence in its fullness requires moving beyond the postpartum framing that most of us have been given and sitting with the reality of what the transition to motherhood actually involves across its full scope and timeline.
The biological dimension
The hormonal changes of pregnancy, birth, and the postpartum period are among the most dramatic that the human body experiences across a lifetime. Oestrogen and progesterone, which reach extraordinary levels during pregnancy, drop precipitously in the days after delivery. Oxytocin surges with breastfeeding and physical contact with the infant. Prolactin drives milk production and has complex effects on mood and cognition. Cortisol, the stress hormone, is chronically elevated in parents of newborns in ways that have measurable effects on memory, decision-making, and emotional regulation.
These are not trivial biological events. They are the hormonal architecture of a major developmental transition, and they do not resolve neatly at six weeks postpartum or twelve weeks or six months. Research on the maternal brain has found persistent changes in brain structure in mothers that last for years after the birth of a child, changes in regions associated with social cognition, empathy, and the processing of social information. The brain that experienced motherhood is a biologically different brain from the one that preceded it. This is not a metaphor. This is neuroscience.
The identity dimension
The identity reorganisation of matrescence is the dimension that most mothers describe as the most disorienting and the least anticipated. Before the baby, most women have a relatively stable sense of who they are: their professional identity, their relationships, their interests, their values, their sense of themselves in the world. After the baby, all of those elements of identity are still present but their relationship to each other has changed, their priority order has changed, and new elements have been added that did not exist before and that take up, in the early months, almost all of the available space.
The psychological work of matrescence is the work of integration: bringing the self that existed before and the self that has emerged through motherhood into a relationship with each other that is not a war. This work does not happen automatically. It requires time, reflection, and often the support of a therapist or a community of women who are in the same passage. Dr. Aurelie Athan's research on matrescence at Columbia University provides the most developed clinical framework currently available for supporting this process.
The relational dimension
Every significant relationship in a woman's life changes when she becomes a mother. Her relationship with her partner shifts under the weight of the new division of labour, the sleep deprivation, and the changed priorities. Her relationship with her own mother often deepens or complicates or both simultaneously. Her friendships reorganise around shared experience in ways that can feel like loss when the experience is not shared. Her relationship with her body, with her sense of time, with her understanding of what she owes to herself and what she owes to others, all of these shift in the first year of motherhood in ways that can feel seismic even when they are, in the framework of matrescence, entirely expected.
Research published in the Journal of Family Psychology consistently finds that relationship satisfaction declines significantly in the first year after the birth of a first child, with the decline more pronounced for mothers than for fathers. This is not a sign that the relationship is failing. It is a sign that the relationship is being renegotiated under conditions of extreme stress and reduced resources, which is exactly what matrescence predicts.
The grief dimension
One of the least discussed dimensions of matrescence is grief: the real, legitimate loss of the self that existed before, the life that had a different shape, the freedoms that were structural features of a pre-child existence and that have not been eliminated but have been fundamentally reconfigured. The spontaneous evening. The uninterrupted thought. The body that was yours alone. The professional self that had space to be ambitious without the complexity of school schedules and sick days and the perpetual logistics of care.
This grief is not ingratitude. It is not evidence that you made the wrong choice or that you love your child insufficiently. It is the natural consequence of transition: when you move from one phase of life to another, something of the previous phase is left behind, and the leaving is a loss even when the moving forward is also a gain. Naming the grief as grief, rather than as a symptom of something wrong with you, is one of the most important things that the framework of matrescence makes possible.
Why Naming It Changes Everything
The research on the value of naming experiences in psychological wellbeing is extensive and consistent. The capacity to name what you are experiencing reduces its emotional intensity, increases your sense of agency in relation to it, and makes it possible to communicate about it in ways that allow others to support you. Without a name, an experience is simply weather: something that happens to you, that you endure, and that you have limited ability to think about or to change.
With a name, an experience becomes a thing that can be understood. That has edges. That has a developmental trajectory. That has research behind it and community around it and a clinical framework for support when support is needed.
"I'm losing my sense of self" sounds alarming, permanent, and possibly pathological. It invites the question of whether something is wrong with you.
"I'm in the middle of matrescence" sounds like a process. A developmental passage. Something with a shape and a trajectory and an endpoint on the other side. It invites the question of what support might help you move through it.
That is not a small difference. It is the difference between a woman who believes she is failing at motherhood and a woman who understands she is in the middle of one of the most significant developmental passages of her adult life. It is the difference between seeking help and suffering alone. It is the difference between understanding that the ambivalence, the grief, the disorientation, and the rage are expected and understandable features of the passage, and believing that they are evidence of something fundamentally wrong with who you are as a mother.
A 2025 pilot study published in Maternal Health, Neonatology and Perinatology evaluated a matrescence-informed education programme for new mothers and found significant increases in self-compassion, environmental mastery, and non-judgmental awareness among participants. The intervention was not medication. It was not therapy. It was education: the simple act of giving women the framework and the language to understand what they were experiencing as developmentally expected rather than personally catastrophic.
What Helps: The Evidence-Based Supports
Understanding matrescence is the beginning of navigating it more effectively. Here is what the research shows actually helps.
Psychoeducation: simply knowing what is happening. The matrescence research is consistent: the most effective first intervention is information. Telling women what to expect, naming the experiences they are likely to have, and framing those experiences as developmentally expected rather than personally problematic reduces the shame and confusion that makes the transition harder than it needs to be. Motherly's in-depth guide to matrescence offers accessible, research-informed content on the identity transition of motherhood. Dr. Athan's matrescence resource site provides the most rigorous academic foundation currently available in plain language.
Community with women in the same passage. The isolation of matrescence is compounded when women believe their experience is unique. Community — whether in person or through digital platforms — with women who are navigating the same territory reduces that isolation and provides the social mirror that allows women to recognise their experience as shared rather than singular. Postpartum Support International maintains a directory of over 50 free online support groups for mothers at every stage of the postpartum period, including groups specifically for the identity and transition dimensions of matrescence rather than only the clinical dimensions.
Therapy with a provider who understands the developmental framing. Not all therapists are familiar with the matrescence framework, and working with one who is makes a significant difference in the quality of support available. Psychology Today's therapist finder filtered by perinatal mental health specialty allows you to search specifically for providers trained in this area.
Time, and the permission to take it. Matrescence resolves over time, typically over the first one to three years after the birth of a child, as the integration of the pre-mother and mother selves gradually completes. Knowing this, and having cultural permission to be in process rather than performed as complete, is itself therapeutic. You are not failing to adapt. You are adapting. The process takes the time it takes.
The Word That Changes the Conversation
She had been trying, for fourteen months, to explain to her husband what was happening to her. She had tried "I feel like I've lost myself." She had tried "I don't know who I am anymore." She had tried crying, which was the most accurate but the least linguistically precise. None of it had produced the understanding she was looking for, because the language she had did not map onto the experience she was having in ways that allowed her to be understood.
Then she read about matrescence.
"I sent him the article at 2 a.m.," she told us. "He read it. He came into the room and he said, 'I didn't know this was a thing.' And I said, 'neither did I.' And we both cried. And then we talked for two hours about everything I had been trying to say for over a year. Because now there was a word for it, and the word made it real in a way that my struggling to explain it had not."
You are not losing yourself. You are becoming someone who includes, and exceeds, who you were before. That process has a name. It has a developmental trajectory. It has a community of researchers and clinicians and mothers who are naming it and building the infrastructure of support around it that this transition has always deserved and never had.
The word is matrescence. You were in the middle of it before you knew what it was called. Knowing what it is called does not change what you are going through. It changes what you can do with it.
