Matrescence, if you don’t already know, is the stage of women’s lives when we undergo changes to our hormones, changes to our bodies, changes to our relationships, changes to our identities, all in the service of becoming a mother.
This change is similar to the change we all go through during adolescence when we underwent changes in our hormones, bodies, relationships, and identities, all in service of becoming a woman.
Like adolescence, it’s a fraught journey. As a kid, I had very little guidance about what to expect during adolescence. I was an angry teen. The journey from girlhood to womanhood was severely complicated by the lack of unconditional love from my parents, the invisibility or fetishization of Asian girls, immigration, and childhood trauma. I got through it, but looking back I could have been so much happier, less anxious, less angry had certain conditions been met to support my journey.
Matrescence, too, is fraught. I had no guidance about what to expect during this journey into motherhood. I was an angry mother. The journey from womanhood to motherhood was severely complicated by spousal abuse and lack of support from my then husband and family, the invisibility of middle aged motherhood, and complex trauma. I got through it, but looking back I could have been so much happier, less anxious, less angry had certain conditions been met to support my journey.
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Things no one told me about motherhood.
No one told me that taking showers would be logistically next to impossible.
No one told me my hair would fall out in fistfuls. Even my eyelashes fell out. It took me years to grow them back and they only returned to their pre-baby length after applying eye lash lengthening serum I bought from Costco two years ago.
No one told me that I would lose all interest in sex with my then husband.
No one told me how physically painful and emotionally dysregulating breast feeding would be.
No one told me that I wouldn’t be able to stomach even looking at chicken wings and that I would lose interest in cheese and chocolate forever. The chicken wing aversion didn’t last, but the other two have never been the same.
No one told me my hair would rapidly begin to grow grey.
By the way, these were the minor realities of matrescence. There were far more significant transformations no one prepared me for…
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The uterus drop
Whenever one of my children fell, my uterus felt like it was falling. I would feel a thud against my pelvis and my uterus would make its way out of my vagina. My vagina would ache, not dissimilar to the ache of contractions, as if to make way for my uterus trying to squeeze out of my body. It was painful. Whenever one of my children fell at the playground, whenever they fell while learning to walk, whenever I would anticipate a fall of any kind, on their butts, on their knees, on their face, their sides, from the bed, from the stairs, from the slide, from just standing, my uterus would free fall down and out of my vagina. It was so painful at times that I had to hold on to a wall to stay upright. This went on for years.
Phantom cries.
I could hear my baby crying no matter how far apart we were no matter the time of day. If I was asleep upstairs, I could hear him stirring even before the baby monitor would pick up enough vibrations in the air to trigger my monitor. Two doors and a set of stairs between us wasn’t enough to keep my sense of hearing from picking up on his movements and sounds. Even when I was out of the house a mile away, I could hear him crying. Even when they began to sleep through the night and they weren’t crying for me, I would wake up to the sound of their crying. I could never sleep through the night. (To this day, I wake up on occasion hearing the voice of my children.) This went on for years.
Constant fear of death.
I became chronically afraid that one or both of my kids would die. I was on death watch 24/7. I once had a dream where I was on one side of road with my 2 year old. On the other side, my newborn was in a stroller crying for me. I had to go to the other side to get my baby. I told my 2 year old to stay exactly where he stood on the sidewalk and to not move. Mommy had to go on the other side of this one lane road to get his brother. I rushed over but just as I was ready to reunite with my 2 year old I saw him running across the road to reach me. That’s when a giant mac truck came barreling down this single lane suburban road and hit my 2 year old. I stood there watching his body fly across the sky as if he’d been shot out of the canon. His body flew so high and so far, I could not see where he landed. I proceeded to race with the stroller in the direction of his arc through the sky. I never found his body. This dream haunted me for years.
Dissolution of my identity.
I could not write. I could not read. I couldn’t access my vocabulary. I became dumb. I could not engage in interesting conversations. I could not make money. I could not have a career because I had to be a full time parent. We could not afford childcare for two kids even with a dual income. I had no place in the world outside of our apartment. I had no sense of who I was besides being a full-time mother. That was all I was, a full-time mother. I felt like I was dissolving every day until I no longer had any idea who I was. This went on for years.
Reparenting your inner child.
Nobody comes home with just one baby. You bring home the newborn and you bring home your inner child. If your inner child didn’t get what she needed at any stage of her life, she is now your responsibility to reparent. She will demand that you attend to her needs, needs that did not get met when you were a child. If you don’t reparent yourself, you will pass on your traumas to your child. Until I finally clued in to that other kid that came home with me from the hospital, passing on my traumas (a lot of which was intergenerational) to my children went on for years .
Loneliness of motherhood.
I have no village. From the moment I discovered I was pregnant to where I live now, I moved 5 times and lived in 5 different cities in a span of 10 years. It’s hard to create a community when you don’t stay in one place for very long. My family, consisting of my mother and sister, live in Canada. I currently live in a suburb of Pennsylvania, 45 minutes drive from Philadelphia proper. When we arrived, people were just beginning to leave behind the pandemic after a long period of isolation. People weren’t inclined to make new connections. They were woefully out of practice. That included me. After 3 years of living here, I have yet to make one friend who I can depend on to feed my cats when I’m out of town. Even when I have been with other mothers in different cities, there wasn’t anyone with whom I felt I was raising my child with. I know they have felt the same way about me. I had nothing left to give after raising my kids alone all day. I have been alone in my matrescence my entire motherhood.
Viscerally intense vulnerability.
This sense of vulnerability that comes with early, pre-partum matrescence trapped me in a marriage I knew was a mistake within the first week of taking vows. Being pregnant, the mere fact of the baby growing in my body, the anticipation of his arrival, that is when matrescence begins. Long before the baby emerges from your body, you are already undergoing the change from womanhood to motherhood. Matrescence during this time made me feel as if my survival depended on the survival of my baby, rather than the other way around. Or as much as the other way around. Because of this intense vulnerability, I believed with every cell of my body that we needed the father of the baby, that our lives depended on keeping him in proximity. I spent the next 12 years convincing myself that my gut reaction to my husband from the first week of my marriage had been wrong, that I had to hang on, work on it, negotiate it, navigate it. Like that tomato in the Pink Martini song. You know what happens to tomatoes that hang on the vine too long? The song says soon I’ll be divine. Right.
It never ends.
Adolescence begins around 11-13 and ends around 25. That means a minimum of 12 years from start to finish for a kid to become an adult. One might argue that most adults are children wearing grown bodies. But adolescence isn’t a process that goes on forever. Your body and brain stop changing at the crazy rate of adolescence. You start to vote maybe and drink and hold down a job. You begin to pay taxes and bills and that’s very different from being a kid.
If you ask Google how long it takes for the woman’s body, just the body, to return to normal after birth, it tells you 6 to 8 weeks. Let that sink in for a minute. Feel the rage rising from your belly and into your throat. This is the crock of shit expecting and new mothers desperately searching the web for answers are faced with. 6 to 8 weeks to get her body back. That. Is. A. Lie.
Let’s assume, hypothetically, 2 years is the average time span when hormone levels and postpartum symptoms reached a plateau. Suspend your disbelief for a minute and stay with me. If the mother has more kids–and 70-80% of first time moms in the US end up having at least a one more child–the perpetuation of pregnancy/postpartum symptoms continue for far longer than 2 years. For instance, I know 2 mothers, one with 4 kids and another with 5. They lived in a perpetual state of pregnancy/postpartum symptoms for 7-10 years. (I got pregnant 3 times and gave birth twice. I was in this state for 5-6 years.) They weren’t themselves for 7-10 years.
What happens to the pre-baby woman? Where does she go? After 7-10 years of being nowhere to be seen, is she still there? Is she dead? What happens to anyone who is nothing but a distant, fragmented, misty memory to the woman who used to be her? Is there anything left to exhume after 7-10 years of being buried alive?
How long does it take for a mother to put together a coherent identity once she realizes that woman is gone? An identity that centers her children, often at the expense of herself? How do you know you’re done putting an identity together that is centered on your kids when the kids keep growing and changing? Who is she now? How about now? And now?
How long does it take for a mother to find her bearings in her marriage that is not just about love and shared finances, but about co-parenting? What if all the financial power lies with one spouse? What if there is no co-parenting, but only married single parenthood? How does one find internal balance when there is so external imbalance?
What about the endless logistical barriers imposed on her friendships due to the needs of the children? Does she even have friends beyond her WhatApp groups? How meaningful and dependable can friendships be without proximity?
When does she reach homeostasis in her body? With her postpartum size? With her breasts that went from sometimes being titties to udders? With her brain turned to mush because everything demands to be mushed for the baby?
When does the process of matrescence end?
It doesn’t. It never ends.
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Matrescence in other cultures: China and Korea.
If you ask a Chinese-American friend of mine what matrescence looks like in their culture, they will tell you new mothers stay in bed for the first six weeks of motherhood. In Korean culture, it’s a month. Their cultures take this time so seriously, they have confinement centers, places new mothers go to get bed rest and heal from labor for six weeks. In Korean culture, the new mom’s mother usually comes to stay with the family for a month and do all the housekeeping work and caregiving of the mother. The only expectation on the new mother in both east Asian cultures is to rest and nurse and bond with her baby. No caring for anything or anyone other than herself and the baby. Nurses at the confinement centers, they tell me, bring the baby to the new mom every 1-3 hours to nurse. “What a dream lol,” they said after telling me this. Everyday, new mothers in China are fed soup made with goji berries for the same reason Korean mothers are served seaweed soup: both ingredients are believed to replenish the iron lost from bleeding during childbirth.
What happens after these 4-6 weeks of this care?
The mother leave the confinement centers, I guess. Grandmothers go home, eventually. The mother is left to carry on with matrescence on her own much like the West.
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What would matrescence look like under the most ideal conditions?
The expectant mother needs to create a community. Members will include close extended family members and friends living in proximity to her and her unborn child. There should be at least 5 adults in regular contact with the baby once she is born. They will help to raise her and care for the mother. So, call mother(s), father(s), sibling(s), aunt(s), uncle(s), cousins, grandparents, and friends and get them resettled to where the soon-to-be mother is living. Or if it’s more convenient, the mother can move to wherever they all happen to be living. They need to live within a 10 minute walk/2 minute drive to the mother’s house.
Ideally, find a place that can house a large portion of these adults under one roof. A commune would be really convenient in this situation. The reason I threw my back, for instance, at the end of my first week as a mom was because I had to push my body to do everything on my own. I needed someone else living with me to pick up the baby when it cried. Also, they need to live with you to rock the baby, walk the baby, hold the baby, bathe the baby, do skin to skin with the baby, change its diaper, feed the baby. On immediate demand. They would also escort the mother and baby for the pediatrician visits that are quite numerous in the first few months of the baby’s life.
Therapy before, during, and after pregnancy would be required. She needs to heal insecure attachment wounds so that the soon-to-be mother can be an attuned caregivers and create secure attachment with her baby and not pass on her complex traumas. Secure attachment is foundational to healthy development of the baby. In fact, family therapy is probably in order for the entire extended family so that everyone can heal from generational trauma and insecure attachment wounds. They almost definitely have some or a lot. This way everyone knows themselves better and understands how to be attuned caregivers and create secure attachment with the baby.
Education about childhood development should be provided alongside therapy so the mother knows what kind of stimulation the baby needs at different stages of her development in order maximize optimal brain health. In fact, this education should be provided to the entire family involved in the raising of the child. That way everyone is on the same page as the child grows and everyone is ready to meet the kid’s needs.
Lowering the mother’s stress by delegating household management also makes nursing easier. Stress, overexertion of the postpartum body, and sleeplessness can seriously impeded milk production, cause milk ducts to plug up, sometimes leading to mastitis. If nursing is what the mom wants to do, it’s great for the baby and promotes bonding between the mom and baby. But only if she wants to nurse. If she wants to feed it formula, go for it. The baby doesn’t give a fuck as long as the feeding is done with attunement and love. No over or underfeeding and a warm, secure embrace is all the baby needs. Breast milk is free and it’s a new experience of the body that the mother might be interested in having.
If the mother feels like it, have her sleep with the baby. There is almost no chance that the mother will smother the baby in her sleep. Her brain will be rewired at this point to be preternaturally sensitive to the baby’s sounds and movements. Reassure her of the biological impossibility of her killing her baby. Her body and mind will forbid it. She will never sleep as deeply as she was able to before the baby was born. Not even close. Co-sleeping with the baby will not only provide the close proximity the baby needs, but also make nursing at night easier for the mother, and who ever is tasked with bringing the baby to the mother and changing its diaper multiple times per night. The mother is not changing diapers at night.
Ideally, all of these conditions would make for a happy early matrescence. Some friction is to be expected. Everyone will be tired, and tired people sometimes make poor choices. Someone gets annoyed, someone uses the wrong word, someone gets a tone in their voice. Someone forgets to pressed the Cook button on the Instant Pot. But these hiccups will be easy to overcome with a household full of securely attached adults all sharing the same goals when it comes to the mother and the baby.
Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Apple TV, Disney apps subscriptions should be included with the witch-hazel and menstrual pads sent home with the new mother when she is discharged at the hospital. Oh, and an Instant Pot and a Roomba. Don’t forget the Instant Pot and the Roomba. Instant Pots and Roombas are a new baby household’s best friend.
As the mother proceeds into matrescence past 6 weeks, 8 weeks, 3 months, etc., she will continue to need the community as much as her baby until the baby is well into her late adolescence, i.e., early 20s.
What a dream lol.
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Unlike my adolescence or my budding mortiscence (aka perimenopause) my matrescence was by choice.
I chose to make two babies in my body. I chose to push both of them out of my vagina. I choose to cultivate a desire to be a good mother even though it often feels like an impossible goal. I choose to read parenting and childhood development books all 13 years in. I choose to take parenting courses, follow parenting experts on IG, listen to parenting podcasts. I choose to tend to my inner children, try to heal my traumas, reparent myself, so that I can be the attuned parent that my kids need.
But matrescence is a dynamic system. If you choose motherhood, motherhood will choose you.
Motherhood made me stop abusing myself with disordered eating. Motherhood made me work my ass off to raise two kids alone for 12 years until shared custody was forced on me. Motherhood held me when my ex left after becoming a substance abuser. Motherhood persuaded me to try to reconcile and put our family back together. Motherhood convinced me to let the marriage go. Motherhood figured out that I wanted to be a therapist, help people, have a meaningful career. So many times, motherhood kept me from crawling into a hole and nursing my self pity, because I had to keep showing up for my kids, even when I didn’t want to show up for myself.
I chose motherhood, and motherhood gave me unconditional love. Unconditional love for my inner child. Unconditional love for my children.
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Change is hard. Matrescence is exceptionally hard. I wish other mothers talked about what it entails rather than hewing to the shallow societal narrative of how it should go down for us.
The culture tells you to love your kids. But women don’t talk about what that love looks like.
The love kids need is not like any love I had ever known. It is not the love for my parents, love for my sibling, love for my friends, love for my lovers and my spouse. Love for your kids is unconditional. Unconditional love for your kids demands your metamorphosis, biologically and metaphysically. The cells of your body and your brain are changed forever. The way to you orient to your self, your career, your dreams, your world is utterly changed. Unrecognizably. Your solar system gets shuffled. The love that kids need demands nothing less than the total reorganization of all your atoms and the repositioning of heavenly bodies.
Well, now that you know, I hope that my experience with matrescence thus far consoles at least one person to grieve and celebrate the changes involved in matrescence. I hope it helps someone feel less alone if they are going through it now or about to go through it soon.
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