It’s hard to describe what it feels like to become a mum, but it has a name: matrescence |
“Completely life-changing”. “Nothing could have fully prepared me”. These are the sorts of phrases you often hear from women when they become a mother.
These descriptions can point to the complexity and depth of the experience. It can be joyous and stressful, exhausting and euphoric, profound and mundane. It’s unlike any other life transition, and – try as we might – hard to capture in words or short phrases.
It turns out, though, there is a word for this process of becoming a mother: matrescence.
It’s a simple but powerful concept that’s changing the way we think about mothering. Here’s what matrescence means and how the concept can help mothers and those supporting them to navigate and understand this time of life.
The term matrescence was coined in a 1973 essay by medical anthropologist Dana Raphael to describe the transition to motherhood. Raphael found most cultures had rites of passage that recognised “the time of mother-becoming”. However, Western countries such as the United States and Australia tended not to.
These practices, which vary depending on the cultural setting, have something in common. They acknowledge that, like adolescence, becoming a mother is a complex experience that brings a period of learning and transformation.
Raphael also coined the term “patrescence”, which, while not the focus of her study, recognised that fathers and other parents also go through a period of transition.
It would take decades, but matrescence made it into the public consciousness in 2017 in an article and widely-viewed TED Talk by reproductive psychiatrist Alexandra Sacks. Books, podcasts and media coverage have abounded since.
Most public discussion of matrescence still tends to centre the challenges of mothering, for example postpartum depression and anxiety.
But there is increasing interest in the many kinds of changes experienced in matrescence, such as dramatic