Written by Lauren Smith-Pierson | Certified Matrescence Coach and Founder, Simply Matrescence™
Lauren is a Mama Rising ICF Certified Matrescence Coach, trained under Amy Taylor-Kabbaz — one of the foremost practitioners in the matrescence field, who studied directly under pioneering researcher Dr. Aurélie Athan. Lauren has supported mothers through private 1:1 coaching, small group cohorts, and workshops since 2022, and previously served as COO and resident Matrescence Guide at Mysha, a membership community for new mothers, where she witnessed over 1,000 women navigate this transition firsthand. She is the creator of The Matrescence Threshold™, a three-stage framework for navigating the identity transition of matrescence, and the Redefine Intensive, its signature small group coaching program. She is a mother of two daughters in the Pacific Northwest and has lived everything she writes about here.
What is matrescence? A definition
Matrescence is the profound psychological, neurological, and identity-level transition a woman undergoes when she becomes a mother — as significant as adolescence, but almost entirely unrecognized by today's mainstream culture.
Key facts:
- Coined by medical anthropologist Dana Raphael (1973)
- Brought into modern clinical practice by Dr. Alexandra Sacks
- Universal — every woman who becomes a mother experiences some form of it
- As significant as adolescence in scope — touching physical, emotional, identity, social, cultural, economic, and spiritual domains
- A years-long process — not a postpartum phase that ends at six weeks or six months
- Not a clinical diagnosis, distinct from postpartum depression/anxiety, though the two can occur simultaneously
- Recurs with each child
If you've been seeing the word 'matrescence' everywhere lately — in your feed, from a friend, somewhere that stopped you mid-scroll — that pause you felt is worth paying attention to.
You're not falling apart. You're not failing. And you're almost certainly not the only one who has lain awake at 3am wondering: who am I now? Why didn't anyone warn me about this?
There's actually a word for what you're going through. And once you have it, things start to make a different kind of sense.
Matrescence is the profound psychological, neurological, and identity-level transition a woman undergoes when she becomes a mother. The term was coined by medical anthropologist Dana Raphael in 1973, and brought into modern clinical practice by Dr. Alexandra Sacks, whose TED Talk introduced it to a generation of mothers who had been waiting for exactly this language without knowing it.
Think of it as the adult equivalent of adolescence, a development passage where so much change takes place. When teenagers go through puberty, we expect them to be confused, emotional, moody, and deeply preoccupied with who they are becoming. We give that transition a name, a cultural framework, and a lot of patience. When women become mothers, we hand them a onesie and a sleep schedule and expect them to figure the rest out.
Matrescence says: this is a developmental passage, not a personal failing. It is as significant as adolescence, it touches every area of your life, and it deserves to be witnessed.
I came across the word matrescence a few months after my first daughter was born, in the thick of the newborn fog, and only a short time into the pandemic. I remember reading it for the first time and feeling something settle:
Oh. There is something going on here. It's not just me.
I'm a certified matrescence coach, and that moment — the word landing — is where almost every conversation I have with a mother begins. That recognition. That exhale. That reorientation from what is wrong with me to oh — I'm going through something.
That shift changes everything. And it's what this work is built on.
Why have you never heard the word matrescence before?
Dana Raphael first used the word in 1973. That is over fifty years ago. And yet if you are reading this article, there is a reasonable chance you have only just encountered it.
This is not an accident. Maternal experience has historically been underfunded, understudied, and culturally minimized. The work of caring for children has long been treated as instinct rather than transformation — something women simply do, rather than something profound that happens to them. Even within medicine and psychology, the focus has been overwhelmingly on the baby's development, not the mother's.
Dr. Alexandra Sacks spent years in clinical practice before naming this gap publicly. In her writing and TED Talk, she described the ambivalence, grief, and disorientation of new motherhood not as pathology, but as a predictable, normal feature of a major developmental transition. The response was overwhelming — women writing from every corner of the world saying variations of the same thing: I thought something was wrong with me.
Academic researcher Dr. Aurélie Athan, whose work forms the scholarly foundation of much of this field, has spent decades building the empirical case for matrescence as a distinct developmental stage. Her research — and the practitioners she has trained, including Amy Taylor-Kabbaz, who trained me — is what grounds this concept in something more than intuition.
Lucy Jones, in her landmark book Matrescence, draws on the feminist writer Adrienne Rich to name something that runs underneath all of this: the "institution of motherhood." Not motherhood itself — the love, the care, the profound relationship — but the sociocultural framework that has grown up around it, with its own rules, standards, and unspoken expectations about what a mother should be. Jones argues that much of what women experience as personal failure during matrescence is in fact the predictable outcome of being measured against an institution that was never designed with the mother's own flourishing in mind. This is also why the word matrescence matters beyond individual comfort. It shifts the unit of analysis from "what is wrong with me" to "what has this culture asked of mothers, and has it ever asked that in return for their wellbeing?" That is a very different question. And it opens a very different kind of answer.
We've been mothering in the dark, without language, without a framework, and without the cultural acknowledgment that this is one of life's most significant transitions. Matrescence doesn't fix that overnight. But it gives us a place to start.
What actually changes during matrescence?
The short answer is: everything. But let's be more specific, because vague reassurances don't serve anyone.
Your brain physically changes
Research on maternal neuroscience — including Chelsea Conaboy's extensively reported book Mother Brain — shows that pregnancy produces pronounced, consistent changes in brain structure. Gray matter changes in specific regions, creating what researchers call a fine-tuning of neural connections: the brain becomes more efficient, more attuned to your baby's cues, more sensitive to threat and reward. Your nervous system reorganizes. Before motherhood, it was scanning for threats to you. After, it expands to scan for threats to your baby too — constantly, even while you sleep. This is not 'mom brain.' This is a major operating system upgrade that nobody prepared you for.
And here's something the research has found that almost nobody is talking about yet: these brain changes may offer long-term benefits that extend well beyond early motherhood. Studies suggest that mothers with more children show patterns opposite to age-related cognitive decline — pointing to the possibility that motherhood confers a form of functional neuroprotection across the lifespan. The brain you are worried about losing? It may be growing in ways we're only just beginning to understand.
Your identity shifts at the root
Matrescence is not just an emotional adjustment period. It is an identity-level reorganization. The values, priorities, relationships, and definitions of success that you built your entire pre-mother life around are now up for renegotiation. Sometimes that feels like freedom. Often it feels like grief. Usually it feels like both at the same time.
Amy Taylor-Kabbaz maps this through the 'wheel of matrescence' — seven domains of life touched by this transition: physical, hormonal, emotional, social, cultural, economic, and spiritual. Across all seven, something shifts. When you feel like nothing in your life is the same, you're not being dramatic. You're being accurate.
The story you didn't know you were carrying
Part of what matrescence surfaces is a story you didn't know you were carrying. A set of deeply internalized ideas about what a good mother looks like — how she feels, what she sacrifices, how instinctively she should take to all of this — that you absorbed long before you became one. Amy Taylor-Kabbaz, whose work sits at the heart of modern matrescence practice, describes this as the gap between the mother you thought you should be and the mother you're actually becoming. Most women experience this gap as personal failure. Matrescence reframes it differently: the story you were given about what motherhood should look like was never really yours. It was built by a culture that had its own reasons for defining motherhood the way it did. The work — the real work — is not closing the gap between yourself and the ideal. It's examining the ideal itself.
Why this generation has it harder
There is also context that makes this generation's matrescence particularly complicated: the absence of paid leave and affordable childcare, social media's relentless illusion that there is a right way to do this, and the loss of village — the in-person, intergenerational community that previous generations of mothers had access to. In my years working with mothers — across 1:1 coaching, group cohorts, and inside a community of over 1,000 new mothers — the women who struggle most are almost always the high-achieving ones. The ones who were excellent at everything before motherhood and cannot understand why excellence isn't working now. That pattern is not a coincidence. It's a feature of matrescence that nobody warns them about.
Is what I'm feeling matrescence — or is it something more serious?
Matrescence and postpartum depression (PPD) are not the same thing, and understanding the difference matters. Matrescence is a universal developmental transition — every woman who becomes a mother goes through some form of it. The disorientation, the ambivalence, the grief, the sense of not recognizing yourself — these are features of the passage, not signs that something has gone wrong.
Postpartum depression is a clinical condition that requires clinical support. It shows up differently and more severely: persistent low mood, inability to feel connected to your baby, thoughts of harming yourself or your baby, a flatness or darkness that doesn't lift. If any of that resonates, please reach out to your doctor or a perinatal mental health professional. That is not a space where coaching is the right first step.
Here's where it gets complicated: both can be happening at once. A woman can be going through matrescence and experiencing postpartum anxiety or depression simultaneously. I know this from my own experience — I became a mother two months into the COVID pandemic, and it took me years to understand that the postpartum anxiety I was living with was a distinct layer on top of the identity transition I was also navigating. Having language for matrescence helped enormously. But it didn't replace the clinical support I also needed.
If you're unsure which side of the line you're on — or whether you're on both sides at once — please talk to your healthcare provider. Matrescence is a framework, not a diagnosis. And frameworks are most useful when they sit alongside proper clinical care, not instead of it.
→ For a deeper look at this distinction, read: Matrescence vs. Postpartum Depression — What's the Difference?
Why does becoming a mother feel like losing yourself?
Because in some ways, you are. And that part is real, and it's allowed to be hard.
Matrescence asks you to hold two things simultaneously: the expansion of becoming a mother, and the loss of the person you were before. Our culture is very comfortable with the expansion part — the joy, the love, the awe. We have greeting cards for all of that. What we don't have language for is the grief. The mourning of your pre-mother self. The specific disorientation of looking in the mirror and not quite recognizing the woman looking back.
The research on maternal identity actually gives us a map for this process — even if it's rarely described in language mothers can use. What the studies show is that this isn't one single rupture but a sequence: there's the preparation phase, where you begin mentally making room for change even before your baby arrives. Then the emotional labor of bringing new parts of yourself forward. Then integration, where you begin the slow work of reconciling who you were with who you are becoming. Then reconfiguration — repositioning your identity within a completely changed context. And then an ongoing evolution that continues across the whole arc of mothering. Knowing you're in a stage, rather than lost in a feeling, changes how you carry it.
Every culture in human history has built ceremony around transitions like this one, and anthropologist Arnold van Gennep showed us why. His 1909 mapping of rites of passage across dozens of cultures found the same three-phase structure every time: you separate from your old identity, you enter a liminal phase — the crossing itself — and eventually you incorporate a new one. He saw childbirth as one of these universal passages. What he also showed is that cultures build ritual containers around these crossings because without them, the crossing stalls. Victor Turner, building on van Gennep's work, described people in the liminal phase as "neither here nor there" — unable to fully release who they were, unable to fully inhabit who they're becoming. The liminal phase asks something specific of the people inside it: the willingness to sit with not-knowing. To release the old story before the new one is ready. For high-achieving women, this is often the hardest part — not the transformation itself, but the uncertainty of the crossing. Modern Western culture has stripped almost all ritual from the transition into motherhood. We have baby showers, which celebrate the baby's arrival beautifully. We have almost nothing that witnesses the mother's passage. Is it any wonder so many of us get stuck in the threshold?
Let me tell you something concrete, because concrete is more useful than abstract when you're in the thick of it.
My first daughter was turning two. My second was about to be born — one year and seven weeks apart. I was heavily pregnant, in the second wave of the COVID pandemic, chasing a toddler, and trying to hold every piece of a life that had doubled in complexity.
I had a Pinterest board. I want you to understand that detail. I had pins saved — elaborate, beautiful birthday cake pictures — because somewhere in my mind I was still the mother who would make the artisan layer cake from scratch. I had already written that version of myself into the story.
Instead, I walked to my mom's house, crying, and handed her a box of Funfetti cake mix. I couldn't get the words out right away. Finally: "Okay. Make her the box cake. I can't do this."
At the time, handing over that box felt like breaking. One more gap between the mother I thought I was supposed to be and the mother I actually was. What I didn't have yet was the language to understand what was really happening: I was still trying to perform as the pre-mother version of myself — the one who accomplished everything, who didn't ask for help, who had it figured out — while simultaneously becoming someone entirely different.
My girls are now four and six. That Funfetti birthday was one of the best parties we've ever had. And looking back at that kitchen moment now, what I see is a woman deep in her own matrescence, who hadn't yet learned to extend to herself the same compassion she gave to everyone else.
This is what I see across the mothers I work with too. The high-achievers especially. The women who were capable and driven and competent at everything before — and who find that none of those tools work the same way now, and who interpret that as personal failure rather than developmental transition.
What I had to slowly let go of in those early years: the belief that I needed to accomplish as much as I did before motherhood to feel valuable. The assumption that asking for help was weakness. The attachment to having everything figured out. And most stubbornly — the story that my own joy and ease weren't a priority.
This is the work of matrescence. Not fixing yourself. Updating the story you're telling about who you have to be.
→ For a deeper exploration: Grieving Your Old Self — The Part of Matrescence Nobody Talks About
How long does matrescence last?
Matrescence is not a postpartum phase that ends at six weeks, or three months, or even a year. Research and clinical experience both suggest it is a years-long process — and it doesn't follow a linear timeline. You can feel like you've found your footing, then a new developmental stage in your child's life, a return to work, or a shift in your relationship can open the whole thing back up again.
It's also worth naming something that almost no popular content acknowledges: matrescence recurs with each child. Dr. Aurélie Athan's definition explicitly recognizes this. If you are on your second or third baby and you feel like you're back at the beginning — disoriented, uncertain, not quite yourself — you're not failing to have learned from the last time. You are going through matrescence again, in a new form, with a new child, in a new chapter of your own identity. This is expected. This is normal. And it means the work of integration is not a one-time event but a living practice.
What changes with time and support is not the complexity of the transition, but your relationship to it. You stop waiting to get back to who you were before and start getting curious about who you're becoming instead.
→ Read more: How Long Does Matrescence Last?
There's a word for it - but how do I actually navigate matrescence?
Here is what I think is the biggest gap in the matrescence conversation right now.
The research has done extraordinary work documenting what changes during this transition. The neuroscience, the identity shifts, the hormonal cascade, the relational reorganization — it's all being studied, named, and validated. And that matters enormously. The documentation is the foundation. It's what lets a woman say: something real is happening to me, and I'm not broken.
But the documentation doesn't tell her what to do on a Tuesday morning when she hasn't slept, her toddler is melting down, she has a work deadline, and she feels like a stranger in her own life. The 'what now' is almost entirely absent from what's available — not in the academic literature, and not in most of the popular content online either.
This is where my coaching work comes in. And it's why, after years of working with mothers through this transition, I developed a framework I call The Matrescence Threshold™ — built around three stages that move women through the identity crossing of matrescence in the sequence that actually works.
Restore is the first stage — and it has to come first. You cannot redefine your values or redesign your life when your body, nervous system, and spirit are depleted. Restore is about tending to yourself at the most fundamental level: sleep, nourishment, nervous system regulation, the practices that help you come back to yourself when the demands of early motherhood have taken you so far from yourself you can barely locate who you are. This stage is relevant in those acute early postpartum months — but it also recurs whenever life throws you back into survival mode.
Redefine is the deeper identity work. Redefining your values, your definition of success, your relationship to work and ambition, your understanding of what a 'good mother' actually looks like (spoiler: it's almost certainly more generous than the one you were holding yourself to). Redefining what you owe to others and what you owe to yourself. This is the stage where the Funfetti cake box moment gets examined — not with self-criticism, but with genuine curiosity about what story you were living inside, and whether you want to keep living there.
Redesign is where the insights become real changes. Redesigning your daily rhythms, your work setup, the structure of your support, the relationships that need renegotiating, the commitments that no longer fit who you're becoming. This is the practical application — not as a performance of having figured it all out, but as an ongoing, living adjustment to a life that keeps evolving.
I introduced The Matrescence Threshold™ in 2024 through my small group coaching program, the Redefine Intensive, and through the work I was doing with mothers in 1:1 sessions. The sequence matters. Most women I work with arrive having skipped directly to redesign — trying to overhaul their lives while still running on empty, before they've done the deeper work of clarifying what they actually want. The Matrescence Threshold pushes back on that. It asks you to restore first, redefine second, and only then redesign.
The research tells you what is happening. The Matrescence Threshold™ is about what you do next. And the first thing it asks — before the redefining, before the redesigning — is that you stop trying to outrun the uncertainty. The liminal space is not a problem to be solved. It is the terrain where matrescence actually lives. Restore is what makes it survivable.
→ To explore what this looks like in practice: What Is a Matrescence Coach?
Where do you start?
Understanding the concept is the first step. And if you've read this far, you've already taken it.
In the coaching work I do with mothers — in private sessions, small group cohorts, and workshops — I almost always start in the same place: with what I think of as the birth of the mother, separate from the birth of the baby. We track every milestone and moment of growth for our children and almost none for ourselves. That absence has a cost.
Some of the questions I bring to this work:
Where have you experienced the most significant shift since becoming a mother?
What area of your life is feeling the stickiest right now?
What has been falling away — and what, if you pay close attention, is starting to take root?
These aren't rhetorical. They're a form of inventory — a way of beginning to see the terrain of your own matrescence clearly, from a place of self-compassion rather than self-criticism. When we deeply acknowledge the weight of this transition, we begin to value our experience differently. When we value our experience differently, we begin to treat ourselves differently.
When we deeply acknowledge the weight of this transition, we begin to value our experience differently. When we value our experience differently, we begin to treat ourselves differently.
Turner also identified something he called communitas — the unusually deep bonds that form between people navigating the same liminal passage together. Something about the threshold dissolves the normal social hierarchies; people meet each other as equals in transformation. This is one of the reasons I structure my group work the way I do. There is something that happens in a room — or a virtual room — of mothers who are all in the crossing at the same time. It is older than coaching. It is something humans have always needed at moments like this.
As William Bridges writes about life transitions: renewal happens when we're willing to let go of something we were attached to and follow where life is pointing instead. Matrescence is that invitation. The question is whether you have enough support to actually hear it.
Frequently Asked Questions About Matrescence
What is the matrescence transition?
Direct answer: Matrescence is the developmental transition every woman undergoes when she becomes a mother — psychological, neurological, emotional, social, and spiritual.
It is universal (every mother experiences some form of it) and significant (comparable in scale to adolescence). The term was coined by anthropologist Dana Raphael in 1973 and brought into modern clinical conversation by Dr. Alexandra Sacks.
What are the symptoms of matrescence?
Direct answer: Matrescence is not a clinical diagnosis, so it doesn't have symptoms in the medical sense — but it has recognizable features.
Common experiences include: feeling like you don't recognize yourself, grief for your pre-mother life alongside deep love for your baby, identity confusion, overwhelm, shifts in relationships and values, a sense of being suspended between who you were and who you're becoming, and a persistent question of 'when will I feel like myself again?' All of these are predictable features of a major developmental transition.
Is matrescence the same as postpartum depression?
Direct answer: No. They are distinct — but they can occur simultaneously.
Matrescence is a universal developmental transition. Postpartum depression is a clinical condition that requires clinical care. The two can overlap — a woman can experience both simultaneously — but they are distinct. If you are experiencing persistent low mood, disconnection from your baby, or thoughts of self-harm, please speak with your healthcare provider. Matrescence coaching is not a substitute for clinical mental health support.
Does matrescence happen with each child?
Direct answer: Yes. Matrescence recurs with each child.
Dr. Aurélie Athan's definition of matrescence explicitly recognizes this. Each baby brings its own version of the transition — a new identity reorganization, new losses, new becoming. If you are on your second or third child and find yourself back in that disoriented, unmoored feeling, that is not regression. That is matrescence, again, in a new form.
Can matrescence affect non-birthing parents?
Direct answer: The research suggests yes.
Studies have found that brain changes associated with caregiving appear in non-birthing parents too — including fathers and adoptive parents who take on primary caregiving roles. While matrescence as a term is specifically rooted in women's experience of becoming mothers, the identity disruption and reorganization of parenthood appears to extend beyond the birthing parent. This is an emerging area of research.
Is matrescence a clinical diagnosis?
Direct answer: No. Matrescence is a developmental framework, not a clinical diagnosis.
This is part of what makes it powerful — it reframes the experience of becoming a mother as a normal, significant transition rather than a disorder to be treated. It gives language to something that has always been real.
What does a matrescence coach do?
Direct answer: A matrescence coach helps you understand and navigate the identity transition of motherhood — distinct from therapy and from generic life coaching.
A matrescence coach helps you understand and navigate the identity transition of motherhood — naming what's shifting, making sense of the ambivalence and grief, and beginning to rebuild a sense of self that integrates who you were with who you're becoming. This is distinct from therapy (which addresses clinical mental health conditions) and from generic life coaching. A matrescence coach works at the intersection of identity, values, and this specific developmental passage. Lauren Smith-Pierson is a Mama Rising ICF Certified Matrescence Coach and creator of The Matrescence Threshold™, working with mothers through private coaching, the Redefine Intensive small group program, and workshops at laurensmithpierson.com.
If this word landed somewhere in you, trust that.
The word matrescence has a way of arriving exactly when a woman is ready for it. Sometimes in the acute blur of the fourth trimester. Sometimes years into motherhood, when the fog has lifted enough to finally look around and take stock. Sometimes when you've been struggling and couldn't quite name why.
Whenever it arrives for you — you're in the right place.
Matrescence Missives is my weekly newsletter where I think out loud about all of this: the identity shifts, the grief, the integration, the practical realities of mothering in this particular cultural moment. It's where I share what I've learned from my own journey, from the research I'm steeped in, and from working alongside mothers who are in the thick of their own becoming.
If this resonates, I'd love to have you there.
→ Join Matrescence Missives
Sources & Further Reading
Raphael, D. (1973). The Tender Gift: Breastfeeding. Schocken Books. [First use of the terms 'matrescence' and 'doula']
Athan, A. (2016–present). Matrescence research. Teachers College, Columbia University / Reproductive Psychology.
Sacks, A. (2017). A new way to think about the transition to motherhood. TED Talk.
Conaboy, C. (2022). Mother Brain: How Neuroscience Is Rewriting the Story of Parenthood. Henry Holt & Co.
Taylor-Kabbaz, A. (2021). Mama Rising: Discovering the New You Through Motherhood. Hay House.
Jones, L. (2023). Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood. Allen Lane. [Includes discussion of Adrienne Rich's 'institution of motherhood']
Rich, A. (1976). Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. W.W. Norton. [Cited in Jones (2023)]
Bridges, W. & Bridges, S. (2019). Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes. Da Capo Press.
van Gennep, A. (1909/1960). The Rites of Passage. University of Chicago Press.
Turner, V. (1969). The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Aldine. [Source of liminal 'neither here nor there' and communitas concepts]
Ibarra, H. (2003). Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career. Harvard Business Review Press. [On the loss of narrative thread during identity transitions]
Hoekzema, E., et al. (2017). Pregnancy leads to long-lasting changes in human brain structure. Nature Neuroscience, 20(2), 287–296.
Orchard, E.R., et al. (2023). Neuroprotective effects of motherhood on brain function in late life. PNAS, 120(4).
