The word that changes everything and why most women have never heard it

In 1973, an anthropologist named Dana Raphael coined two words that would go on to shape how we think about birth and motherhood. One of them, Doula, became widely known. The other, Matrescence, remained largely absent from mainstream conversation for the next fifty years.

Matrescence describes the transformation a woman undergoes as she becomes a mother. Not just the physical transformation of pregnancy and birth, but the complete neurological, psychological, emotional and relational reorganisation that follows. The rewiring of the brain. The dissolution of one identity and the slow emergence of another. The grief and the expansion happening simultaneously, without anyone naming either.

It is a transformation as profound as adolescence. And yet unlike adolescence, which we have rituals for, language for, a cultural understanding of as a passage, Matrescence is treated as though it is not happening. As though the woman simply had a baby and should now be getting on with things.

The consequences of that silence are not abstract. When there is no word for an experience, it cannot be researched, funded or adequately supported. When there is no cultural acknowledgment that a woman is in the middle of a genuine transformation, she is left to interpret her own symptoms, the identity confusion, the grief, the ambivalence, the intensity of emotion, as personal failings rather than as the expected features of an enormous crossing.

Sixty-seven percent of mothers have never heard the word Matrescence. That number stays with me.

Cambridge Dictionary added it in 2022. Oxford and Merriam-Webster still have not. In early 2024, Peanut and Tommee Tippee took out a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for that to change. Dictionary.com has since added it. A documentary is in production. The conversation is growing, slowly, but it is growing.

What naming something changes is not the experience itself but the relationship a woman has to it. When she understands that what she is moving through has a name, that it is a recognised transformation, that other women have moved through it and that her feelings are not evidence of failure, something shifts. Not everything. But something essential.

That is why naming Matrescence matters. Not as an academic exercise. As an act of care toward every woman who is in the middle of this crossing without knowing it has a name.

— Sabah, The Line Between · Beaufort, VIC

#Matrescence, #Whatismatrescence, #Becomingamother, #Maternalidentity, #Postpartumidentity, #MatrescenceAustralia, #BirthdoulaBeaufort, #Maternalwellbeing, #Motherhoodtransformation, #DanaRaphael