WTF is Matrescence?!
The word that explains EVERYTHING you've been feeling as a mother.
Let me guess…
You became a mom and something shifted. (Yeah, duhhh, Lexi).
But not just your schedule, not just your body, not just your relationship or your career or your social life—although ALL of those too.
Something deeper and harder to name though,
You looked in the mirror one day and didn’t quite recognize the woman looking back. Maybe in a totally dramatic, crisis-level way. Or maybe in this quiet, disorienting, when the eff did that happen kind of way.
You love your kids. That part is not in question—it’s actually almost embarrassingly NOT in question, because you love them sooo much it physically HURTS sometimes.
And also. Also!! You feel like you’re disappearing. You feel like the woman you were before—the one with her own thoughts and desires and a sense of herself that didn’t depend entirely on whether everyone in her house was fed and regulated and okay—she’s somewhere under all of this. You can feel her. But you can’t quiiiite reach her.
And nobody told you this was coming. Nobody sat you down before the baby arrived and said, heyyyy, by the way, this is going to crack you open at an identity level. You are going to go through one of the most significant developmental transformations of your entire life. You will not be the same person on the other side. And while it will feel like a HUGE problem. It’s actually NOT a problem (although society will probs make you feel that way). It’s actually the ENTIRE point.
Nobody said that.
And maybe like I was, you’re left feeling like WTF???
Because instead you got a registry checklist and a hospital bag packing list and approximately forty million recommendations for baby swaddles (but then you realized, WAIT, we’re not swaddling these days!!!).
So you figured it had to be YOU. Your anxiety, maybe. Your inability to adapt. Your ingratitude—because look at this beautiful life, look at these beautiful children, what is wrong with you that you’re sitting in your car/shower/grocery store aisle/[insert your location of choice] uncontrollably crying at 2pm on a Tuesday?
Nothing is wrong with you.
You’re in the throes of MATRESCENCE.
And knowing that changes everything.
The Word That Disappeared For Fifty(!!!) Years
In 1973, an anthropologist named Dana Raphael coined a term: matrescence.
She meant it to describe the physical, psychological, and social transition a woman goes through when she becomes a mother. The developmental process—because that’s what it is, a process, not a one-and-done event—of being REMADE by motherhood.
She published it, and then, for about fifty years, it largely disappeared from mainstream conversation.
It took until 2017—2017!!!!!!!— for a reproductive psychiatrist named Dr. Alexandra Sacks to write about it in the New York Times and bring it back into cultural consciousness. To say, yessss bitches, this is real, this has a name, and the fact that we stopped talking about it has been costing women ENORMOUSLY.
Think about that for a moment. We HAD a word for this. We knew this experience was real and significant enough to name. And then we quietly shelved it while continuing to send women through one of the most profound transformations of their lives with zero framework, zero ritual, and zero cultural acknowledgment.
Ughhh, even just typing this out right now makes my BLOOD BOIL.
Because OF COURSE, we have an entire vocabulary for adolescence. Coming of age stories, rites of passage, and cultural ceremonies across virtually every human society—because we understood that when a child transitions into an adult, something enormous is happening and it deserves to be witnessed and held.
And yet the woman who transitions into a mother? We hand her a casserole, tell her to sleep when the baby sleeps, and get quietly uncomfortable when she seems less than thrilled about every moment of it.
HAAA.
The fact that this word existed, buuuut we chose not to use it is not an accident—like at ALL.
But we’ll get to that in a bit…
What’s Actually Happening In Your Brain And Body
Here is the part where I need you to really hear this, because I think it might be the most validating thing anyone has ever said to you about motherhood…
Your brain changes shape when you become a mother.
Not metaphorically. LITERALLLLLY (neurologically).
Research published in Nature Neuroscience found that pregnancy causes significant gray matter changes in the brain—reductions in volume in specific regions associated with social cognition and the ability to understand and respond to others’ mental states. This is not deterioration, k?
This is specialization. Your brain is literally restructuring itself to attune more deeply to your baby, to read their needs, and to respond to their cues with a sensitivity that wasn’t there before.
You didn’t get dumber. Farrrr from it.
But you did get…different.
And then there’s the hormonal upheaval—the dramatic shifts in estrogen, progesterone, oxytocin, cortisol—that make the postpartum period one of the most chemically turbulent of a woman’s life. Bigger hormonal swings than puberty. Bigger than menopause. Your entire internal chemistry is recalibrating (although maybe it feels a bit more like swinging around like the wrecking ball in a Miley Cyrus music vid).
And then there’s the neurological rewiring that comes from the experience itself—from the sleep deprivation, the hypervigilance, the constant demand on your nervous system, the learning curve of keeping a human alive. Your threat detection system is on HIGH ALERT in a way it has never been before. Your capacity for empathy is expanded in ways that can feel both profound and completely overwhelming.
You are not the same person you were before. That is not a feeling. It is a physiological FACT.
So when you say I don’t recognize myself—well yeah, no shit! The self you knew before has been genuinely, measurably, and neurologically altered. The disorientation you feel is not weakness. It is not ingratitude. It is the accurate perception of a woman who is in the middle of a biological and psychological transformation of enormous magnitude.
Knowing this doesn’t make it easier, necessarily. But it makes it make sense. And sense—after months or years of quietly wondering what is wrong with you—is not nothing. Sense is everrrrything.
Why Nobody Told You—And Who That Serves
Let’s get a lil spicy here. Because I think the disappearance of this word—and the cultural silence around matrescence—is absofuckinglutely worth interrogating.
Here is what I keep coming back to—a woman who understands her own transformation is a woman who has a framework for her experience. She has language for her grief, her rage, and her disorientation. She can say this is matrescence instead of something is wrong with me *cuuuuue blame and shame spiral*. She can locate herself inside a process instead of feeling like she’s failing at a role.
A woman who understands her transformation is harder to gaslight.
She’s harder to convince that her needs are too much, that her anger is a character flaw, that her desire for more is selfishness, and that her grief is ingratitude. She’s harder to keep small and compliant and too exhausted to ask for better.
And a culture that needs mothers to keep running on empty—to keep performing selflessness, to keep saying I’m fineeee (when they so AREN’T) and to keep centering everyone else’s needs at the cost of their own aliveness—that culture is not well-served by women who have language for what’s happening to them.
I’m not saying there was a meeting of minds that decided to put this word underground (although…I’m not not saying that). I’m saying the incentives are clear.
We have built an entire infrastructure of support around the baby’s development—infant sleep consultants, postpartum doulas, lactation specialists, developmental pediatricians, sensory play curriculums, mommy and me everything. And I am genuinely, completely here for all of it. THANK THE LORDYYY those things exist!!
But who is building the infrastructure for the mother’s development?
Who is holding space for her transformation?
Who is saying what is happening to YOU right now is also significant, also worthy of attention, also deserving of a framework and a ritual and a community and a name??
Not enough people. Not nearly enough.
The Myth That Holds It All
Here is where I’m going to ask you to come with me somewhere a little older, a little deeper.
Because I think the most useful container I’ve found for the matrescence experience isn’t a scientific framework. It’s a story. A myth, actually. One that is over four thousand years old and somehow maps onto the modern mother’s experience with an accuracy that makes the hair on my arms stand up every time.
It’s the story of Inanna.
Inanna is a Sumerian goddess—powerful, radiant, the Queen of Heaven and Earth. And at the height of her power, she decides to descend into the underworld to visit her sister Ereshkigal, the Queen of the Great Below.
At each of the seven gates she passes through on her descent, she is required to surrender something. Her crown. Her robes. Her jewels. Her measuring rod. Her power. One by one, at each gate, everything she has used to show up in the world — every symbol of her identity, every armor, every adornment—is stripped away. She cannot pass through the gate carrying who she was. She must leave it at the door.
She arrives in the underworld naked. Brought to her knees. Everything false removed. Everything performative gone. Everything she was before—the identity, the power, the role—completelyyy surrendered.
And then she returns. NOT as who she was. As something more real. More essential. More herself than she had ever been—because now there is nothing left that isn’t genuinely, authentically, irreducibly her.
OOOPH. Let that last sentence sink in one more (or a zillion more) times…
More herself than she had ever been—because now there is nothing left that isn’t genuinely, authentically, irreducibly her.
THAT!! is matrescence.
Not the loss of self. The stripping of everything that was never really self to begin with. The performance. The armor. The version of you built for other people’s comfort and expectations. The identity assembled before you knew who you actually were.
Motherhood doesn’t take you from yourself. It takes you to yourself—and yeah, okay, through the most disorienting, demanding, identity-obliterating route imaginable. GULP.
But I begggg you to realize that you are NOT lost. You are simply mid-descent.
The gates are real. The stripping is real. The nakedness and the disorientation and the not-knowing-who-you-are-anymore—allllll of it real, all of it part of the process, all of it exactly what is supposed to be happening.
And the return? It’s coming. It always comes. In fact, if you look closely enough for the clues, you may even see that it’s already here.
But the return requires the descent first. You cannot skip the gates. You cannot keep your crown and still come back transformed. That’s not how the myth works. That’s not how matrescence works.
What It Means For You—Right Now
So here you are. Maybe you’re six weeks postpartum. Maybe you’re three years in. Maybe your youngest just went off to college and you’re standing in a quiet house for the first time in years wondering who you are when nobody needs anything from you.
Wherever you are—this is what matrescence means for you right now:
The disorientation you feel is not a malfunction. It is the accurate experience of a woman in transformation.
The grief you feel—for the woman you were, for the freedom you had, for the parts of yourself that went quiet—is not you being ungrateful. It is the real cost of a real transition, and it deserves to be felt, not bypassed.
The rage you feel—at the invisible load, at the unequal distribution of labor, at the culture that handed you this enormous transformation and then looked the other way —is not a character flaw. It’s hot flaminnn POTENT information that is pointing at something true. So ask yourself—what is it trying to tell me? Maybe that I’ve been denying or trying to disregard?
The desire you feel—for more, for yourself, for a life that feels fully inhabited and not just managed—is not selfishness. FAR from it. It is the part of you that survived the descent and is ready to return. And tor return as her FULL-RANGE, MULTDIMENSIONAL SELF. This is your aliveness and life-source. THIS IS EVERYTHING!!
And the woman on the other side of this? She is not a diminished version of who you were. She is not a tired, hollowed-out, gave-everything-to-her-kids shadow of your former self.
She is what is left when everything false has been stripped away.
She is more real, more grounded, more herself than you have ever been.
She is the woman who went through the gates.
And she is already here, underneath all of this, waiting for you to remember her.
Why I’m Writing This
Because when I became a mom, I felt absolutely and totally lost and soul-crushed. I had no framework for what was happening to me.
I felt alone. I felt like something was wrong with me. I felt the grief and the rage and the disorientation and the wild, ferocious love all at the same time and I had nowhere to put any of it.
And then inside of a mothers circle, I found the word matresence and the myth of Inanna. And something in me exhaled for the first time in a long time.
I want that exhale for every mother who is mid-descent and doesn’t know it.
MILF & Tea is the space I built for that. A circle for mothers who are in the middle of becoming something they don’t have words for yet. Where the matrescence is named and the grief is held and the rage is honored and the desire is welcomed and the whoooole, multidimensional, gloriously complicated woman underneath all of it gets to come home.
And if you’re sitting with the question who am I becoming through all of this?? You’re not in crisis—pinky promise!!
That is the most important question you could possibly be asking.
And if you want to be held in the process of matrescence, come find me!! You don’t have to figure this out alone.
Join us for a MILF & Tea Mothers Circle—the first one is totally free!!
xx, Lexi
Lexi D’Angelo is the founder of MILF & Tea Mothers Circle — a space for full-range, multidimensional mothers navigating the identity-shattering, soul-stretching transformation of motherhood. Virtual + IRL Bermuda.
DM @lexidangelo on Instagram for deets on our next session and to join.