In August of 2009, I walked into my closet to pick out my clothes for work. I distinctly remember scanning the various garments on hangers and shelves, without recognizing any of them, despite having worn them before. “Who’s are these?” I thought to myself, “because clearly they are not mine”. I literally felt like these clothes didn’t belong to me at all.

Little did I know then, that I experienced what is termed “matresence”.

In 2009, I had physically birthed my first child. For 10 months before the physical birth, I nurtured life in the womb. Before all of that came into play, I made a conscious decision to become a mother and attempted conception. 

Approximately three years after birthing my first child, I birthed a second child. 

Motherhood is a deeply profound shift in a person’s life. This rite of passage impacts one’s psychological, emotional, physical, mental, relational, sexual and spiritual identity. 

I now have a 15 year old and a 12 year old. It was only in the last year that I learned a term that captured so much of my experience in becoming and being a mother. I’ve heard many of these experiences from my clients too. 

Let’s take a look at matresence and how this might apply not only to your mothering experience but to your relationship, marriage and sex life. 

Partners of mothers can benefit from reading this article too.

What is Matrescense?

Matresence is the rite of passage that begins the moment you decide you want to become a mother. It is a profound change of identity that does not end once birth occurs but continues to shift and evolve over time. 

The term matresence was coined in the 1970’s by medical anthropologist Dana Raphael. Clinical psychologist Aurelie Athen, Ph.D., from Columbia University, defines matresence as:

“…a developmental passage where a woman transitions through pre-conception, pregnancy and birth, surrogacy or adoption, to the postnatal period and beyond. The exact length of matrescence is individual, recurs with each child, and may arguably last a lifetime! The scope of the changes encompasses multiple domains –bio-psycho-social-political-spiritual– and can be likened to the developmental push of adolescence. Increased attention to mothers has spurred new findings, from neuroscience to economics, and supports the rationale for a new field of study known as matrescence.”

Adolescense and Matrescence

Psychologist Erik Erikson is best known for his creation of the psychosocial stages of development. In each stage of human development, he captures a psychosocial crisis or developmental conflict that humans work through as they move through that developmental period. 

Erikson identifies the human years 12-18 as the crisis or conflict known as Identity vs. Role Confusion.

This stage and its associated developmental conflict captures the profound shift one moves through from adoloescence into adulthood. Influenced by a hormonal upheaval, adolescents attempt to answer “who am I?” and experience confusion, insecurity, conformity or rebellion, connection or isolation, dependence and independence, simultaneously. 

Researchers note the similarities between this stage and transitioning into motherhood. Again, influenced by a hormonal shift that can increase hormones by 200-300 times, mothers experience a true metamorphosis, whose identity is changed forever. This occurs whether a mother has birthed a living child or not, and for those who go through surrogacy and adoption. 

For those who birth, research shows that it can take years for a mother’s biology to restore much needed vitamins, minerals and nutrients. This discovery has led to continued research on what’s now called post-natal depletion.

Life Domains Forever Changed

Many mothers report motherhood as a push-pull experience. They struggle to talk about this openly in fear that any negative spin on motherhood will have others think they don’t love their children.

Let’s look at just some examples of how the push-pull can manifest in different life domains.

                                         

Relationship and Sex Life

Just as your identity will never feel the same, neither will your relationship. On the one hand, you and your partner may experience an abundance of joy and love while sharing in the wonder of watching your tiny human develop and grow. But, you will also at times experience grief or loss for the ease that you felt in life before children. You may have moments of envy seeing other couples easily go out on date nights, host parties, or take multiple vacations a year. 

Accessing your body for yourself, or to engage sexually with your partner may feel nearly impossible. 

A sex therapy teacher of mine once said, “If a couple comes to see me for sex therapy a few months after they just had a baby, I tell them to wait a year before calling because not much is going to change.” She knows that these parents need time to transition more fully into these new identities and roles before attempting to have a robust sex life.

Financial Dependence

If you choose to be a stay-at-home mom, you may struggle with not bringing in a paycheck, or relying on your partner for financial stability. While this arrangement may be fully agreed upon, some mothers report that they struggle in having to ask their partner for money so that they can do simple things like get a haircut. Your identity as a financially independent person has changed. This can bring an extraordinary amount of discomfort and ambivalence to a relationship. Even if you feel grateful for the privilege of staying at home to care for your child, it can bring insecurity, fear and unsettling dependence.

Career Balancing Act

If you nurtured a career prior to becoming a mother, you may struggle with the ambivalence of going back to work or staying home with your baby. On the one hand, from the time you were young, you might have always known what career you wanted. Prior to children you may have nurtured and excelled at your professional life. But upon returning, you may feel like you don’t quite know how to fit back into that role. While at work, you may long to be home or feel guilty for working, or for loving your job. 

Yet while at home, you may feel grateful to nurse your baby and/or attend to your child, but long for the structure and accomplishment that your career once provided.

Your Body

If you birthed your child, your body experienced trauma. Not trauma in the sense that something went wrong, although that could have happened, but trauma in that your body experienced a seismic shift that requires recovery.

Not only from birth but also from years of nursing, having sleepless nights, etc. Hair, skin, nails, appetite, energy and body shape may all change.

The Split 

The work is never about feeling “normal” again, although that’s often the language that’s used in the media. A mother desperately wants to both embrace her new role but also remember the other parts of her identity. 

Values, politics, beliefs and spirituality also tend to make profound shifts, either by deepening or changing altogether. It can take years before all of these changes become more integrated.

Coming back to 2009 in that moment in my closet, matresence felt very real. I had changed so profoundly that I couldn’t identify with the wardrobe I once wore. They felt so foreign to me, I didn’t recognize them and couldn’t imagine wearing them again.

I did, of course, but that moment captured the split I felt between how I once identified myself and who I had become. That wardrobe represented someone else, a different life, something other than how I felt at that moment.

The bottom line is that motherhood is a portal to an extraordinary, awesome, difficult, beautiful, wild, powerful and intense experience. It holds both the light and the shadow.

The Integration

Some say it takes seven years post birth for a mother to more fully integrate her identities. That’s seven years for each child that is born. 

Matresence is critical for partners of mothers to understand in order to help them depersonalize the changes that may occur. Often, when the relationship feels deprioritized and/or sex falls off the map, partners assume it has to do with them. Science now shows us that motherhood involves a massive shift that profoundly disrupts multiple areas of life. 

The psychosocial crisis of matresence is more than just a need for the popular advice of “self-care for mothers”. Providing language for this transition is essential to the well-being and self-understanding of all mothers. It helps normalize a very natural outcome of motherhood which in turn reduces stigma, confusion, isolation and shame. 

CITATION:

Athan, Aurelie. (2024, May, 14). Working Definition. https://www.matrescence.com/