By Shanna Harding, Food Scientist and Certified Postpartum Doula, Resting Rituals
She’s doing everything right.
The baby is fed. The house is functioning. Everyone around her thinks she’s incredible. And she’s standing in the kitchen at 9pm, baby finally down, and she realises she can’t remember the last time she felt like herself.
She loves her baby fiercely and also misses her old life in a way she can’t quite say out loud. She’s waiting to feel like herself again. And she’s quietly starting to wonder if something is wrong with her.
Nothing is wrong with her.
She’s not waiting to feel like herself again. She’s in the process of becoming someone new. And there’s a word for it, one that most women have never heard.
Matrescence, the word nobody gave you
The term was coined in 1973 by anthropologist Dana Raphael, the same researcher who introduced the word doula into modern usage. She used matrescence to describe the process of becoming a mother: a developmental transition as significant and as disorienting as adolescence.
Think about what adolescence involves. The body changes. Identity shifts. Relationships reorganise. A person’s sense of self is temporarily destabilised before it reforms into something new. Nobody tells a teenager that something is wrong with them for finding it hard. We understand it as a developmental process. Uncomfortable, necessary, and ultimately transformative.
Matrescence is the same thing. In a grown woman. With a newborn in her arms.
Dr Aurelie Athan, a psychologist at Columbia University, spent more than a decade building the research framework around matrescence, establishing it as a recognised developmental stage with real psychological implications. Psychiatrist Alexandra Sacks brought it into mainstream conversation through her TED talk and New York Times writing. More recently, science journalist Lucy Jones’ 2023 book Matrescence carried the word to an even wider audience, blending the neuroscience of maternal transformation with her own unflinching account of becoming a mother. The concept is gaining real traction in perinatal psychiatry, because it reframes postpartum distress not as pathology but as a predictable feature of a major developmental crossing.
What it actually feels like
It holds contradictions. That’s what makes it so disorienting.
You love your baby and you miss your old life. Both are completely true, at the same time. The grief for what came before, the freedom, the sleep, the version of yourself you knew, is real and legitimate. So is the love. Neither cancels the other out. But because nobody told you that you were allowed to feel both, you carry the grief privately and perform only the love.
And it doesn’t arrive on a schedule. I’ve talked to so many mothers moving through this shift, and the grief lands at different points for every one of them. For some it’s three or four months in. For me, it was around the six month mark. I remember the moment it hit: this is my life now. And then came the grieving. My old freedom. My routines. The version of me who could move through a day without accounting for anyone else. And layered over the top of it, guilt. Guilt for grieving a life I’d willingly left, while also being genuinely happy. I didn’t understand yet that both of those things could be true at once.
You might not recognise yourself either. Priorities shift in ways you didn’t predict. Things that mattered deeply before matter less now. Things you never thought about consume you entirely. You might feel less sharp, less ambitious, less like the version of yourself you’d spent decades building. This is not loss. It’s reorganisation. But it can feel like loss before it feels like anything else.
I felt this one hard. Before kids, my ambitions and my partner’s sat side by side. Two careers, two lives, equal weight. Then the children came, and somewhere in the shuffle my career quietly became less important. And here’s the confusing part. I wanted that. I want to be a mum first and foremost. I read every development book I could find and made mothering my priority, deliberately, with my whole heart. And still, the weight of the things that made up who I was before kids somehow just… went. Nobody took it from me. It didn’t happen to my partner. It’s a shift Lucy Jones writes about in her book Matrescence, this quiet asymmetry in how parenthood reorganises one life and not the other. Reading her book put language around something I’d been feeling for years.
The grief is real, and it’s allowed
Matrescence involves a genuine identity reorganisation. Career identity, social self, body, relationship, the shape of your days. All of it shifts at once. The grief that comes with that doesn’t need to be minimised or reframed away.
You’re allowed to grieve the freedom. The sleep. The relationship as it existed before the exhaustion and the negotiation of who gets what. The professional identity that defined so much of how you understood yourself.
And it changes shape with each baby. When I became a mother of two, the weight was different. I found myself grieving the mother I’d been able to be for my first, and feeling sad that I couldn’t be that same mother for my second, because my energy was now shared between two small people. Nobody warns you about that particular grief. It’s real too. And it’s allowed too.
You can hold all of it alongside the love. That’s not contradiction. That’s the texture of matrescence.
What’s actually happening in your brain
Here’s the part that changed everything for me. The disorientation isn’t in your head, or rather, it is, but not in the way you think. Your brain is physically reorganising.
In 2017, neuroscientist Elseline Hoekzema and her team scanned first-time mothers before and after pregnancy. They found consistent, measurable changes in the brain’s grey matter, specifically in the regions that handle social cognition, the very areas you use to read and respond to another person. The changes were so reliable that a computer could look at a scan and tell whether a woman had been pregnant. And they lasted at least two years after birth.
This is where the adolescence parallel stops being a metaphor and becomes biology. The last time your brain remodelled itself this dramatically was puberty, driven by the same surge in sex hormones. Your brain isn’t malfunctioning. It’s specialising. Those grey matter changes actually predicted how attached mothers felt to their babies, which suggests the reorganisation is the brain fine-tuning itself for exactly what motherhood asks of it.
So when people joke about baby brain, they’ve got it backwards. You’re not losing your mind. Your mind is being rebuilt for a new job.
Oxytocin is part of this too. It surges around birth and during breastfeeding and skin-to-skin contact, and it does two things at once: it helps initiate the bond with your baby, and it buffers stress by working against cortisol. This is one reason those slow, quiet moments of holding your baby can feel genuinely regulating. Your neurochemistry is doing real work.
None of this erases the grief or the strangeness. But it does reframe it. You’re not failing to be yourself. You’re a person whose brain is actively becoming something new.
What naming it changes
For me, everything shifted when I started doing the reading. Once I understood the research behind what was happening, the genuine changes in the maternal brain, the reorganisation that becoming a mother actually involves, I stopped seeing myself as someone failing to bounce back to normal. I saw the transformation for what it was: becoming a new version of myself. And I finally understood that I was allowed to grieve the old me and still be happy in the life I have now.
There’s research behind this too. Neuroscientists at UCLA found that simply putting a feeling into words calms the amygdala, the brain’s alarm centre, and engages the prefrontal regions that help us regulate. The effect isn’t dramatic. Naming a feeling doesn’t make it disappear. But it turns the volume down, and it moves the experience from something happening to you into something you can look at. Matrescence works the same way. The word doesn’t remove the discomfort of the crossing. It gives you somewhere to stand while you’re in it.
That’s what naming it does. A woman who knows she’s in matrescence moves through it differently than one who thinks she’s failing. She can stop waiting to feel like herself again and start getting curious about who she’s becoming. She can grieve without deciding the grief means something is wrong. She can hold the contradictions without needing to resolve them.
She can say: I’m in a crossing. It’s uncomfortable. It’s also the most significant thing that’s ever happened to me. And I know what it is.
That’s not a small thing. That’s everything.
When it might be something more
One last thing, because it matters. Matrescence is a normal developmental process, but postnatal depression and postnatal depletion are real, distinct conditions that can sit alongside it. If your low mood persists regardless of circumstances, if you’re struggling to find interest in anything, or if anything feels heavier than what I’ve described here, please talk to your GP or call the PANDA helpline on 1300 726 306.
This is the exact conversation we’re having at the next Gathering Table. I’m hosting a matrescence day, a free gathering on the Sunshine Coast for mothers and mothers-to-be to sit with all of this together, because naming it in a room full of women who get it is a different experience to reading about it alone. You can save your seat at here, I’d love to see you there and it’s completely free.
References: Raphael, D. (1973) on the origin of the term matrescence. Athan, A., Columbia University, on matrescence as a developmental framework. Sacks, A. on matrescence in perinatal psychiatry. Jones, L. (2023), Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood. Hoekzema, E. et al. (2017), Pregnancy leads to long-lasting changes in human brain structure, Nature Neuroscience, 20. Feldman, R. et al. (2007) on oxytocin and mother-infant bonding, Psychological Science, 18. Lieberman, M. D. et al. (2007), Putting Feelings into Words: Affect Labeling Disrupts Amygdala Activity in Response to Affective Stimuli, Psychological Science, 18(5).
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