Matrescence (Raphael, Athan)
The idea that becoming a mother is a developmental passage, as wide as adolescence, that reshapes the body, emotions, relationships, work and sense of self. It frames the confusion and grief of early motherhood as part of a change in identity that takes time, alongside any illness that may also be there.
What drives it
The word gives a name to the gap between the person someone was and the parent they are becoming, so ‘I don’t recognize myself’ can be heard as change in progress. Useful for identification because new parents are often asked only whether they are depressed or happy, and many are neither.
How it shows
Work
Returning from leave and finding the old ambition gone, or doubled. Feeling like an impostor in a job that used to fit, and unsure who to say this to.
Relationships
Friends without children drifting away. Seeing one’s own mother in a new and harder light. A partner whose life seems to have changed far less.
Self
Notice what you mourn from before the baby and what you would not give back, and whether both can be true on the same afternoon.
What tells it apart
Postpartum depression (perinatal depression): Matrescence names a normal change, with mixed feelings and ordinary days. Postpartum depression is more likely when low mood or loss of interest lasts most days for two weeks or more, and it may need care.
Identity diffusion: Identity diffusion is a lack of commitment to any sense of self. In matrescence the person may be committed and still reworking who they are around a new role.
Ambivalence: Ambivalence is holding love and resentment for the same person or role. It may be one part of matrescence, which covers the wider change in body, work and relationships.
A test
Ask what feels lost and what feels new since the baby, and whether there are still days that feel all right. A mix of loss, newness and ordinary days could fit matrescence. Steady low mood with little else may point to depression.
Questions to carry
- What did I do this week that the person I was before the baby would not recognize?
- Which part of my old self am I still waiting to get back, and which have I stopped missing?
Go deeper
- Read: The Kazdin Method for Parenting the Defiant Child, Alan E. Kazdin with Carlo Rotella, 2008. Written for parents by a Yale psychologist who spent decades testing parent management training: praise and small rewards for the behavior a parent wants to see, built up in small steps. That approach has many controlled trials behind it with children referred for defiance and aggression, though Kazdin's own 1997 review said questions remained about how large, wide and lasting the effects are. The book itself does not walk through the studies. It carries the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies' Self-Help Seal of Merit.
How strong the research is
weak. Matrescence is a frame for thinking more than a tested model. Athan (Frontiers in Psychiatry, 2024) writes that the idea was largely neglected for about fifty years and that research on it is still scattered, with basic questions such as how long it lasts unanswered. Writers on matrescence often cite brain imaging by Hoekzema and colleagues (Nature Neuroscience, 2017), which found gray matter reductions in first-time mothers lasting at least two years after birth, though that study did not test matrescence as such.
Where it comes from
Dana Raphael, medical anthropologist, ‘Matrescence, becoming a mother, a new/old rite de passage’, in Being Female: Reproduction, Power, and Change, 1975. Taken up by Aurélie Athan at Teachers College, Columbia University (Athan and Reel, Feminism & Psychology, 2015)