The first time I heard the word matrescence, I cried. Not because I was sad — because finally, somebody had given a name to the thing I had been living for two years and could not describe to anyone, not even my husband, not even myself.
If you've found this page, you've probably typed something into Google like why don't I feel like myself anymore or identity crisis after baby. You weren't searching for a clinical term. You were searching for someone to tell you that what's happening to you is real. So let me start there.
It's real. It has a name. The name is matrescence, and it's not a disorder. It's a developmental shift — as significant as adolescence, actually. The cultural conversation just hasn't caught up yet.
Adolescence has a name and a shelf in the bookshop. Matrescence — until very recently — didn't. We hand teenagers a vocabulary for what's happening to them. We hand new mothers a feeding chart and tell them to enjoy every minute.
The word was first coined by an anthropologist called Dana Raphael, in the 1970s. She noticed that the literature had a word for adolescence, and a word for menopause, but no word for the developmental crossing into motherhood — and so she made one. It sat quietly in academic journals for forty years.
Then in 2017 a reproductive psychiatrist called Alexandra Sacks gave a TED talk about it that has now been watched millions of times. Lucy Jones wrote a book called Matrescence in 2023 that went on to win prizes and end up in book clubs. Reddit threads started using the word at three in the morning, because the women in those threads finally had a name for what they were trying to describe.
That's how words enter the language: women whisper them to each other before academia catches up.
What it actually feels like
I'll spare you the textbook. Here's what women describe in my consulting room, almost verbatim, every week:
I love my baby and I feel like I've lost myself.
I don't recognise the woman I see in the mirror.
Nobody told me I'd grieve the person I used to be.
I used to know what I wanted. Now I don't know what I want, and I feel guilty for not knowing.
I'm doing all the things — feeds, appointments, work, the school run — and from the outside it looks like I'm coping. From the inside, I'm somewhere else.
You know what I'm talking about, right? The grief that arrives uninvited at the door of something you wanted. The strange envy when you see a friend without children walk out of her house alone. The slight panic when somebody asks you what your hobbies are now. The sense, sometimes, that you've left the country and forgotten how to come home.
None of that means you don't love your baby. None of it means you regret being a mother. It means you're paying attention to a real, structural shift in your identity — and most of the women around you are pretending it isn't happening, because the cultural script we were raised on doesn't have a slot for it.
Why it's not the same as postnatal depression
This is the bit I want to be careful about. Matrescence and postnatal depression can absolutely coexist — being deep in matrescence can make depression more likely, and being depressed can make matrescence harder to navigate. But they aren't the same thing.
Postnatal depression is a clinical condition with diagnostic criteria, and it has good treatments — including counselling, medication, the supports through PANDA and Gidget Foundation if you're in Australia. If your low mood, numbness, anxiety, or rage has been building for weeks and isn't lifting, please talk to your GP.
Matrescence isn't a disorder. There is nothing to diagnose. It's a normal developmental process — universal — that some of us pass through with relative ease and many of us pass through in a state of quiet, prolonged disorientation. You don't need a label for it to be real, and you don't need treatment for it in the medical sense. What you might need, what most of us need, is somebody to sit with us while we figure out who we're becoming.
The Italian thing — and what I didn't know until later
I'm originally from Salento, in the south of Italy. I moved to Australia in my twenties and rebuilt an entire identity from the ground up — new language, new climate, new social codes, new winter. I thought that was the hardest reshaping I'd ever do.
Then I had a baby, and matrescence dismantled me again.
In Italy, motherhood is woven into family. Your mother and aunts and grandmothers are in the kitchen. Somebody always has the baby. Identity is held by a community whether you want it held or not. In Australia, especially for women without family nearby, motherhood can be the opposite — a strange, quiet, very private undoing.
I had no language for it for a long time. The word matrescence didn't reach me until well after my own children were past babyhood. I am writing this, partly, so it reaches you sooner.
What helps
Three things, in my experience:
The first is the word itself. Naming what's happening reduces shame faster than almost any other intervention. If you take nothing else from this piece, take the word. Use it on yourself when you next can't think of an answer to what do you do for fun? Tell yourself: I am in matrescence. This is what it looks like.
The second is letting go of the version of you that existed before. I know — I'm sorry. I won't pretend that's not a real grief. But the woman you were before the baby is not coming back exactly as she was, and the work of pretending she will is part of what's keeping you stuck. There are bits of her worth bringing forward, absolutely. But there are bits of her that belonged to a life with more sleep and fewer stakes, and those bits don't fit anymore. Let them go gently.
The third is finding somebody to sit with you while you figure it out. That can be a counsellor — me or someone else. It can be a mothers' group that knows how to talk about this. It can be a friend who's a few years ahead of you and will tell you the unflattering truth. The work of meeting your new self is much, much easier with company.
You don't find your old self. You meet your new one, slowly, while still feeding the baby.
A note before you go
If this reading has made you cry, that's normal. You've recognised something. That recognition is the start of the work, not the end of it.
If you'd like company for that work, I do this for a living — matrescence counselling is one of the threads I sit with most often in private practice. You can book a free fifteen-minute call any time. No commitment after, no preparation needed.
Either way: the word is matrescence. The thing you're feeling is real. Pass the word on to the next woman you see who looks like she needs it.
— Elisa