"I don't recognise myself since becoming a mum."

There is a moment — it arrives for many women, at different times — when you look up from the life you are living and think: I am not sure who I am anymore.

Not in a dramatic way, necessarily. Not always in a way you can name. Just a quiet sense of dislocation. Of having left a version of yourself somewhere and not being able to find your way back to her.

This is one of the most common things I hear from women in my practice. And it is one of the least talked about parts of motherhood.

Becoming a mother is not an addition to who you are. For many women, it is a complete reorganisation. And nobody warns you that this might feel like loss.

What matrescence is

There is a word for this — matrescence. It describes the developmental process of becoming a mother: the physical, psychological, social and identity shifts that happen when a woman moves into motherhood. It was coined in the 1970s and has been mostly ignored by mainstream culture ever since.

Matrescence is being compared, increasingly, to adolescence — another period of profound identity reorganisation. And like adolescence, it can be disorienting, destabilising, and grieved even as it is welcomed.

You can love your child completely and still grieve the person you were before. Those two things are not in conflict.

What identity loss looks like

It can look like not knowing how to answer how are you? anymore — because you are not sure who is being asked. It can look like missing things about your former life while knowing you would not trade what you have. It can look like feeling invisible at work, or suddenly uncertain about a career you were confident in before.

It can look like sitting with friends you have known for years and feeling like a stranger. Like the conversation has moved on and you cannot quite locate yourself in it.

It can look like grief for a body that has changed, for a relationship that has reorganised itself around a child, for a self that used to have edges and now seems to dissolve into everyone else's needs.

You are not losing your mind. You are in the middle of one of the most profound identity shifts a human being can go through. It is allowed to be hard.

The grief nobody names

What I find, sitting with women in this, is that there is often grief that has never been allowed space. Grief for the life before. Grief for the version of yourself who did not yet know what this would cost. Grief, sometimes, for the relationship you had with your partner before a baby reorganised everything.

This grief is real. It does not mean you regret your child. It does not mean you are not grateful. It means you are human, and that human beings grieve change — even change they wanted.

When that grief has no space to breathe, it tends to come out in other ways. As irritability. As flatness. As the vague sense that something is wrong without being able to say what.

What helps

The first thing that helps, almost always, is naming it. Having someone reflect back to you: what you are experiencing is real, it has a name, you are not alone in it, and it does not mean something is wrong with you or with your motherhood.

The second thing is being given permission to grieve — without being told that gratitude should cancel it out. You can hold both. You are already holding both.

The third thing, over time, is finding your way to a new sense of self — not the one you had before, which is gone, but one that includes who you are now. One that has room for the mother and the woman and the person who existed before either of those things.

A note before you go

If you do not recognise yourself right now — that is not a sign that you are lost. It is a sign that you are in the middle of something. And the middle of something is exactly where support helps most.

— Elisa