Matrescence Series Part 1: What It Is
It’s the excitement of the positive pregnancy test. It's morning sickness that lasts all day. It’s tears and confusion when the morning sickness doesn’t get better in the second trimester, but you can’t complain about it because we have to be grateful for this experience. It’s the constant peeing. The weird, yet comforting kicks at 28 weeks. The preparation, the baby showers, the packing of the hospital bag. It’s the birth. THE BIRTH OF IT ALL. It’s the out of body experience seeing them hold up your baby to show you for the first time. It's trying to figure out nursing before they send you home from the hospital. It’s going home from the hospital terrified, why are they letting us take this little thing home…alone? It’s the tears and phone calls to lactation consultants. It’s deciding to bottle feed or pump and the insecurities if we don’t nurse our baby. It's parenting books and blogs and Instagrams and substacks and podcasts. It’s the cuddles and kisses and baby smells you can’t get enough of. It’s visitors and casseroles and baby clothes. It’s the contentment of staring at your new baby. It’s the discontentment of feeding and changing and burping and feeding and changing and burping. It’s the joy that comes when you see them look at you, look through you. It’s the resentment toward your partner because you feel like you’re doing more. It’s the whispers shared with your partner about how lucky you feel to be this one’s mom. It’s the happiness of leaving home successfully with a baby in tow. It’s the loneliness of 2am feedings. It’s the frustration that your partner doesn’t hear them cry in the middle of the night. It's decision fatigue–do I go back to work, can I stay home, can I work less, can I ask for more time off? It’s your partner going back to work, leaving you alone at home, with a new human to keep alive. It’s the intrusive thoughts about anything and everything that could go wrong. It’s walking extra slow down stairs while you hold them, shielding their head going around corners, and getting so close you can feel them breathe just to make sure they still are. It’s the desperate need to preserve your own sense of self amidst the upheaval of it.
It’s the intense love and simultaneous fear of it all.
It’s Matrescence.
The word Matrescence was coined in the 1970s by medical anthropologist, Dana Raphael. She wanted a word for the physical, emotional, hormonal, and social transition to becoming a mother. The next closest experience similar in scope is adolescence. She noted specifically that the term adolescence comes from the Latin word “adolescere” meaning, to emerge, grow, or mature. When a woman becomes a mother, however that comes to be, she certainly emerges from the experience with a new identity, grows in ways that seem limitless, and matures exponentially. The three stages of adolescence–early adolescence, middle adolescence, and late adolescence–can be compared to the stages of conceiving or making the decision to foster/adopt a child, pregnancy and having an infant or toddler, and finally, raising our kids through adulthood.
Much like the awkwardness of adolescence, I certainly felt (and still feel) that same sense of insecurity, and painful growth that comes with mothering as I did between the ages of 10 and 20. When my first daughter was around a year old, I’d find myself alone with her, worrying if she was having fun, if she thought I was fun, if she found satisfaction in my company–not very different from when I was around my peers in school. It felt scary and nerve-wracking and honestly, ridiculous. I thought I had done enough self-work in therapy, why are these feelings and thoughts coming back up as an adult, I often wondered. Later I learned, it’s a normal part of the process, all a part of Matrescence.
There’s a line to toe in which many of the aforementioned experiences are a normal part of the process, and then on the other side of that line, there are thoughts, feelings, memories, sensations that could be considered problematic at best and detrimental to one’s functioning, at worst. Just because it’s a part of Matrescence doesn’t mean it’s not worth talking about or seeing a professional to treat it. Just because it’s Matrescence doesn’t mean something is wrong with you or that you’re a “bad” mother. (I feel compelled to insert some line about it being the hardest and best experience of my life, but that feels redundant. If you’re reading this, you get it. You get the complexity of what I’m trying to say.) True Matrescence is in the both/and. It’s in the gray area of not knowing what we’re doing and trying to follow our instincts. It’s acknowledging that it’s an isolating experience that sometimes might require us to get help from a therapist or doctor or insert whatever other specialist. It’s also acknowledging that it’s fun and exciting, boring and maddening.
There’s been a resurgence of the word in the last several years, and thank goodness for that. Having a word for something brings us closer to one another and to the experience itself; it helps us understand and accept each other in ways that the quippy motherhood tropes on social media cannot. It helps us understand and accept ourselves better. I wish I had known about this in the early days of my own first pregnancy. I would have been a lot less concerned with some of the startling changes I was experiencing.
That’s what compelled me to want to write this Matrescence series. I want to simultaneously decrease the stigma around getting help for some of these perinatal challenges all while normalizing that these experiences are quite common. This topic is vast; there are so many layers to Matrescence and I love peeling back and examining each one. My hope is that you’ll find at least one piece of information that might be helpful to you. I hope it improves your well-being or quality of life throughout your own journey.
If you want more on this topic, I cannot recommend Lucy Jones’s book, Matrescence, enough. Part memoir, part research, she puts so many things into perspective for anyone interested to learn more about what happens to someone when they become a mother.