Matrescence — the word for what's been happening to you.

Matrescence is the psychological, hormonal, and identity-level transition into motherhood. As significant as adolescence. As bewildering. The difference is that adolescence has a name and a shelf in the bookshop, and 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.

It's a real word. It was coined by the anthropologist Dana Raphael in the 1970s, and reintroduced into mainstream conversation by the reproductive psychiatrist Alexandra Sacks. It's now finding its way into Australian mothers' groups and Reddit threads at 3am, which is usually how we know a thing is real — when women have been silently sharing it long before the books arrive.

Matrescence isn't postnatal depression (though they can coexist — see the PND page). It isn't anxiety, though anxiety often runs alongside it (the postnatal anxiety page is over there). It's the broader, slower thing underneath. The remaking of who you are.

Sentences I hear, almost verbatim, every week:

I love my baby and I feel like I've lost myself.
Nobody told me I'd grieve the person I used to be.
I didn't expect motherhood to change how I saw myself this much.
I don't know what I want anymore. I used to know what I wanted.

You know what I'm talking about, right? The grief that arrives uninvited at the door of something you very much wanted. The strange envy when you see a friend walk out of her house alone. The slight panic when someone 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 that 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.

I'm originally from Salento, in southern Italy. I moved to Australia and rebuilt an identity from the ground up — new language, new climate, new everything. I thought that was the hardest reshaping I'd do.

Then I had a baby. Nothing about my first migration prepared me for the way motherhood would dismantle and remake me again.

In Italy, motherhood is woven into the fabric of family. Your mother and aunts and grandmothers are in the kitchen. Someone 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, it can be the opposite — a strange, quiet, very private undoing.

I sit with both versions of this in the consulting room. Australian-born mothers far from family. Migrant mothers who don't have a word in their first language for what they're feeling. Australian women whose families are physically nearby but emotionally absent. Whatever the shape of yours, I notice it.

I'm not going to hand you ten coping strategies and send you off. The work of matrescence isn't symptom management — it's a slow recalibration of who you are. That takes someone alongside you, not above you with a clipboard.

In sessions, we make space for the version of you that's emerging. We name what's changing. We grieve what you've lost — yes, even the things you wanted to leave behind. We figure out who you'd quietly like to meet again. We stop demanding that you go back to who you were before.

Sometimes that's tearful. Sometimes it's funny. (Motherhood is genuinely absurd quite a lot of the time, and you're allowed to laugh about it in here.) Mostly, it's slow. We move at your pace.

On matrescence.