There's a word for what's happened to you.

A note from Kate, our Co-Owner and CMO

 

There's a moment somewhere in your motherhood journey, where you catch your reflection, or hear yourself speak, or have a thought that seems odd to come out of your mouth. You don't recognise it, but for some reason it doesn't feel overly unfamiliar to you either.

It's not the body. The body you can negotiate with. It's the inside of you. The part that used to make decisions, hold opinions, have a self that wasn't entirely defined by whether your baby has done a poo and how recently. 

If you've felt that shift, ever so slight, that quiet repositioning, there is a word for it. We just don't say it often, or loudly.

Matrescence.

For me, I registered the shift when my son was about 1½ years old. I do think it happened earlier, I just wasn't aware that such a thing existed. Our culture doesn’t like to talk about the transition mums go through, so I wasn't aware that my old self quite literally disappeared into never-land, and was no longer actually on option to be again. 

Matrescence rhymes with adolescence on purpose. The anthropologist who coined it in 1973, Dana Raphael, named it specifically to draw that parallel.

Adolescence is the developmental transition from child to adult, and we treat it as obvious. Of course teenagers are unstable. Of course their bodies are changing. Of course their identities are in flux. Of course they need patience, time, and an absurd amount of food. And please give them the space they need to find themselves. 

Matrescence is the same kind of transition. The developmental shift from maiden to mother. Biological, psychological, hormonal, social, spiritual, all at once. And we treat it as nothing.

For me the change has been subtle in many ways. To those in the outer circles of my life, they wouldn't recognise it. But to me, it cracked me wide open. My whole mindset shifted, my priorities changed, my emotional regulation is now wildly in tune, but just try to get in between me and my child. I swear I have an internal cave woman ready to rip to shreds off anyone who so much as looks at him the wrong way. There is a lioness lurking inside me that was not there the day before my son saw this world.

I found this clarity and stillness I had never had before. It’s like the world made a bit more sense, while at the same time making less sense than ever, I almost became afraid of it. I feel like I understand my place in this world more than before, and oddly I have never felt more like an animal than I do since becoming a mum. I feel akin to a gorilla more than ever.

A recent survey of mothers found that about 70% had never heard the word. And guess who else didn't know about it. My husband. That's right. The man whose child I had, who watched me go through a monumental shift in my identity, shrugged and said, “I thought something like that occurred”. Bear in mind, I am an avid feminist and a prolific advocate for mothers’ rights. But it seems I wasn't screaming it loud enough.

That is what we're working with.

The word sat in a single 1973 book on breastfeeding for thirty-five years. Dr Aurelie Athan at Columbia University picked it up in 2008 and started rebuilding the language around it. 

A New York Times piece, "The Birth of a Mother," dragged it into the popular conversation. Lucy Jones' 2023 book Matrescence gave it a global audience. Right now, in 2026, there's a growing movement of clinicians, journalists and brands pushing to get matrescence into the actual dictionary.

Okay, but what does the science say (for the next time your father-in-law pisses you the f*** off)?

When you become a mother, your brain undergoes the most significant structural rewiring of your entire adult life. Pregnancy reshapes grey matter, cortical thickness, the white matter pathways that carry signals between regions. Researchers actually have tracked it month by month and described the changes as "similar to those seen in adolescence." That's right, month-to-month. You read that right. Each month a new change occurs. Cute, huh.

So when you feel like a teenager again, moody, unmoored, ravenous, unrecognisable to yourself, there's a reason. You transitioned. You literally have gone through the same kind of neural restructure your body did at thirteen. Except this time you have a mortgage, a job, and a small human depending on you for survival, and dinner due on the table at 6pm. Easy, right?

Shall we talk about the cognitive changes? Studies show cognitive decrements at three to eight months postpartum, with improvements a year or more after birth. That's right. OR MORE. You might be waiting for some time. I am still waiting. That's not baby brain. That's your brain reorganising itself for its new job.

The thing nobody recognises as work is, biologically, one of the most demanding adaptations the adult human brain ever performs. And you are doing it on no sleep, while lifting a small human who gets heavier by the day. I mean, I could actually laugh out loud, it's so wild to me.

Why don't we have a word for this in common use?

Because the medical system is built to focus on the baby. The six-week postnatal check is for the baby. The growth chart is for the baby. Mum gets handed a pamphlet about pelvic floor exercises (if she is so lucky) and asked if she wants to think about birth control. Like, are you freaking high? DO I want to think about sex. Lady, your head needs to be examined.

Early-stage mums are in the middle of the largest psychological reorganisation of their lives and nobody has even given them a world to help understand it. I have a feeling if this transition was happening to men, there would be a very different support system in place. Hell, you would go to the matrescence hospital and be waited on hand and foot, like a day spa.

One in ten women will develop a mental illness in the first year of motherhood. That's a very real statistic, and it saddens me to think of mums struggling along at home with their baby. Among mothers with more than one child, a third will experience postnatal depression. These are not edge cases. They are a baseline failure of recognition, of language, and of care.

This is the part that makes me genuinely angry. We do not, in common, clinical use, have a word for the single largest identity transition most women will ever go through. That is not an accident. That is a category that has been allowed to stay invisible.

If you take one thing from this piece, take this

What you are feeling has a name. It has science behind it. You are not failing at mother or losing your old self. You are matrescing through it. You have been reborn, and this new you might feel unrecognisable. But girl, the glow-up you are feeling, or soon might feel, is worth it for who balloons on the other side. 

We want a generation of mothers who hear the word matrescence in their first antenatal appointment, not in their fifth year of quietly trying to sort their head out. We want the six-week check to ask about the mother. We want the pamphlets rewritten. We want the language out of the academic journals and into the mouths of midwives, GPs, partners, friends, bosses, husbands.

And while all that happens, slowly, structurally, generationally, we want you to know that what you're going through is real and recognised. Oh, and it has a goddamn name.

In the meantime, we'll keep lifting. Like only a mother can.