When a child is born, the whole world focuses on them. But in that same moment, another extraordinary event takes place — a mother is born. Today, a quiet revolution is unfolding across the world. There is a growing recognition that this transition is not simply a change in social role. It is a profound biological and psychological transformation — and it has a name.
In 2023, British journalist Lucy Jones published a book with a single-word title — Matrescence — and it became Book of the Year according to the New Yorker, New Statesman, and the Daily Mail. Reproductive psychiatrist Alexandra Sacks' TED Talk gathered more than 27 million views. Scientific journals are publishing research on how motherhood literally rewires the brain. Women across the world are writing on social media: "I finally understand what was happening to me."
It has a name — matrescence.
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Where Did This Term Come From?
Although the term only went viral recently, it was introduced more than 50 years ago by anthropologist Dana Raphael in 1973.
In her landmark work The Tender Gift: Breastfeeding, Dana Raphael not only first described the concept of matrescence — she fundamentally changed the way we understand what a woman actually needs after the arrival of a child.
Studying motherhood across more than 250 cultures worldwide, she noticed something striking: in most societies, there are special rituals, rules, and systems of support for a woman in the period after birth. Only in Western culture does all attention sharply shift to the newborn after the birth — leaving the woman alone with everything happening inside her.
Raphael gave this phenomenon a name — matrescence — combining the Latin mater (mother) with the suffix -escence, which denotes a process of becoming. Just as adolescence describes the pubertal transition into adulthood, matrescence is the transition into motherhood.
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Her central finding was that the success of breastfeeding and a mother's mental health depend not on some mythical "innate instinct," but on the quality of social support a woman receives. Raphael openly criticised the medical practices of her time, arguing that the medical community was effectively ignoring the enormous psychological transformation of the woman — focusing exclusively on the physical health markers of the infant.
She wrote:
"Childbirth brings about a series of very dramatic changes in the new mother's physical being, in her emotional life, in her status within the group, even in her own female identity. I distinguish this period of transition from others by terming it matrescence to emphasise the mother and to focus on her new lifestyle."
It is worth noting that Dana Raphael also coined the word "doula" — and that term caught on immediately. Matrescence, however, remained in the shadows for decades.
Who Brought It Back
In 2008, clinical psychologist and Columbia University faculty member Aurélie Athan, Ph.D., came across Raphael's work while searching for an explanation for what she was seeing in her patients: women who came to her feeling that they had "disappeared," that they "didn't recognise themselves," that they were "supposed to love every minute — but couldn't." No existing clinical category described this state accurately.
The concept of matrescence became her answer. Athan devoted the following years to returning the term to scientific and public discourse — now through the lens of contemporary psychology.
She insists: the duration of matrescence is individual, recurs with each child, and may arguably last a lifetime.
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Who Is Talking About This Today
Alexandra Sacks' article in the New York Times and her TED Talk, "A new way to think about the transition to motherhood," became an entry point for millions of women. She explained matrescence to a mass audience in plain terms: this is not a pathology — it is a normal, if demanding, developmental process.
Lucy Jones — science journalist
Her book Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood (2023) was a genuine breakthrough. Jones wove together personal experience with research from neuroscience, evolutionary biology, psychoanalysis, and sociology. The book was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction and received reviews including "the best book I've ever read about motherhood."
She describes the dangerous consequences of ignoring the maternal experience: today, one in ten women develops a mental illness in the first year of motherhood.
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In 2023, the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences published a landmark paper by Orchard, Rutherford, Holmes, and Jamadar — "Matrescence: lifetime impact of motherhood on cognition and the brain." The authors demonstrated that the maternal brain undergoes significant structural and functional neuroplasticity, which is long-lasting and present throughout the rest of a woman's life. The structure of grey matter changes; areas responsible for empathy, social perception, attention, and memory are reorganised.
Researchers found that in the first months after birth, certain cognitive functions temporarily decline — not because the mother is "getting dumber," as mothers themselves often say, but because the brain is reorganising itself around new demands. A year or two after birth, cognitive performance not only returns to previous levels — in many women, it surpasses them. There is a hypothesis that the cognitively complex environment of motherhood builds a cognitive reserve that protects the brain in old age.
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In Ukraine, we know the term "postpartum depression" well — and we've certainly heard of "burnout." But all of these terms describe something that has gone wrong. Something to be treated or fixed.
Matrescence is different. It is a word that says: what is happening to you is normal. You are not broken, not weak, not a "bad mother" for not feeling like yourself. You are moving through one of the most complex and significant developmental processes in human life.
And when you have no word for what you are experiencing — you cannot talk about it. You cannot ask for support. You cannot understand that it will end. You cannot explain it to your partner, your mother, your friend.
In the context of Ukrainian realities — where women often become mothers amid war, displacement, the absence of support, and the pressure to "hold it together" — the recognition that your transformation is real and significant can be a genuine psychological lifeline.
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How This Understanding Can Change Your Life
1. You stop blaming yourself. When you know that the feeling of "I don't know where I am" is a normal part of transition — not a sign that you are a "wrong" kind of mother — you free yourself from an endless cycle of guilt.
2. You stop waiting to "go back to yourself." Matrescence says: the previous version of you is, in part, already a different person — and the new you is still forming. You haven't "lost yourself." You are in the process of becoming.
3. You can talk about it. With your partner, your doctor, your friend, your therapist: "I'm going through matrescence" is a completely different statement from "I feel terrible and I don't know why."
4. You relate differently to "mummy brain." Forgot where you put your keys? Hard to concentrate? That is simply neuroplastic reorganisation — your brain is literally learning to be a mother.
5. You give yourself time. Matrescence does not end 40 days after birth. It can last months, or even years — and that is normal. You have the right not to "recover" on a schedule.
Dana Raphael wrote in 1975:
"Giving birth does not automatically make a mother out of a woman. The amount of time it takes to become a mother needs study."
Fifty years have passed. Science is finally studying it. The world is finally acknowledging it. And it is time for us to add this word to our vocabulary.
Share this with someone who is in this process right now.
Sources
- Dana Raphael, The Tender Gift: Breastfeeding (1973) — first appearance of the term
- Wikipedia — Dana Raphael
- Aurélie Athan — matrescence.com
- EmPower Matrescence — empowermatrescence.com
- Alexandra Sacks, TED Talk: A new way to think about the transition to motherhood
- Lucy Jones, Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood, Penguin, 2023 — penguin.co.uk
- Orchard, E.R., Rutherford, H.J.V., Holmes, A.J., Jamadar, S.D. (2023). Matrescence: lifetime impact of motherhood on cognition and the brain. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 27(3) — cell.com
- Chechko, N. et al. (2025). Maternal neuroplasticity and mental health during the transition to motherhood. Nature Mental Health
- REC Parenting — recparenting.com
- Positive.news — positive.news
