What Is Matrescence?
You don’t forget the moment everything shifts. The weight of a newborn placed on your chest. The silence that follows the cry. The way the world keeps spinning, but somehow you’re not quite on it in the same way anymore. There’s a before and an after but no one told you how wide the gulf would feel.
For generations, we’ve talked about motherhood in practical terms. The nappies, the feeding, the routines, the exhaustion. Sometimes we talk about postnatal depression. Sometimes we joke about the chaos. But few people talk about what really happens, the slow, soul-deep unravel and reweaving of the self. The becoming. That’s where matrescence lives.
Coined in the 1970s by anthropologist Dana Raphael and brought into wider recognition more recently through the work of women like Lucy Jones, matrescence is the term for the transition a person undergoes when they become a mother. Think adolescence, but for mothers, a hormonal, emotional, social, psychological transformation that touches every part of you.
Lucy Jones’ book Matrescence lifts the lid on what many of us have felt but not had words for. Motherhood doesn’t just change you, it remakes you. Not overnight, not in a linear way, and not always gently. It’s biological, yes. But it’s also cultural, spiritual, emotional. Your brain physically changes. Your body shifts. Your priorities, relationships, and sense of self move under your feet. And yet, society acts as though you should bounce back. As though this monumental transformation is something to be neatly managed, quietly endured.
No wonder so many mothers feel like they’re falling apart. When what they’re really doing is coming undone in the way that all meaningful becoming requires.
And this matters, now more than ever, because the noise around motherhood has never been louder. Expectations have never been higher. We’re told to be gentle, patient, present, ambitious, productive, eco-conscious, always-available women. We’re expected to raise emotionally secure children while carrying the weight of a culture that still doesn’t value care work or honour the process of becoming a mother. Matrescence reminds us that we are not failing. We are transforming.
To name it is to validate it. To say “I am in matrescence” is to step outside of shame and into truth. It’s not a diagnosis. It’s not a weakness. It’s a word for the in-between place. The becoming. The messy middle. And perhaps most importantly, it opens up space for compassion. For ourselves, and for each other.
We need that space. We need language that holds our complexity and our contradictions. We need to stop asking mothers to be everything and instead start asking what they need as they move through this ancient, sacred transition.
Because matrescence isn’t just something we go through. It’s something we deserve to be supported in.
