Why I Created The Mother's Village — and What I Believe It Is Really For

There is a moment I keep returning to, not because it was dramatic (it was not) but because of what it showed me about something I had not yet learned to name.

I was on my own pre-conception journey, that season before a pregnancy begins which is tender and uncertain in ways that are hard to put into words, and I kept noticing the same thing missing. Not information, there was plenty of that, and not medical care, which was there when I needed it, but something closer to presence. I was surrounded by women and yet I was moving through something entirely alone, not because anyone had failed me, but because no space existed where this particular experience was considered worth holding. I looked for that space, did not find it, and decided to create it myself. That is where The Mother's Village began.

What I thought it was — and what I discovered it actually is

When I opened the first circle I had a clear enough sense of what I was building: a gathering space for women navigating the motherhood journey across its different seasons — pre-conception, pregnancy, postpartum — warm, without judgement and without a fixed agenda. That is still true. But over time, through reading and attending conferences and sitting with women in their most honest moments, I came to understand that what I was really trying to hold was something the culture does not yet have adequate language for.

Matrescence is a word coined in 1973 by anthropologist Dana Raphael, and most people who have heard it understand it as the transformation a woman goes through when she becomes a mother, the way the brain rewires, the shift in identity, the grief and the expansion of crossing that threshold. I have come to believe something slightly different, and it is the conviction at the centre of everything The Mother's Village is built on.

But I have come to believe something slightly different. Something that feels more true to what I see in women and what I feel in myself.

I do not yet know whether matrescence, in its full biological and neurological dimensions, moves through every woman. What I do believe and what I feel in my own body on a pre-conception journey that has not yet included pregnancy, is that the psychological dimensions of matrescence may be universal. That the question at the heart of it — who am I becoming? — moves through every woman at some point in her life, triggered not only by pregnancy and birth but by the deeper passage of becoming more fully oneself. That conviction feels important enough to name, even if I cannot yet fully prove it. Even if I am still living the evidence of it myself.

We do not choose adolescence, and yet it takes us, reshapes us without asking, and returns us to ourselves as someone we could not have fully anticipated. I believe Matrescence works in the same way, that it comes for every woman, that some move through it with language and community and the quiet dignity of being seen, and that most move through it alone, convinced by that silence that something is wrong with them, when in fact something of real consequence is happening to them.

What the village actually holds

The Mother's Village gathers monthly in Beaufort, Victoria, and it is a circle, which is a specific thing, different from a support group or a social catch-up. In a circle, women arrive without having to perform a particular emotional state or show that they are doing better than last time. What is shared in the room stays in the room, and what needs to be said can be said without someone immediately trying to fix it. It exists because I believe that what I needed on my own pre-conception journey, to be witnessed without being advised, to sit with what I was moving through without it being reframed into something more comfortable. This is what most women need at every stage of this passage and almost never receive.

It exists also because the village is not a romantic idea but a real and historical one. Women have always gathered, have always held each other through the crossings of a life, and what we are living through now is the isolation of new motherhood, the way birth and postpartum have become private experiences, the quiet expectation that a woman will move through one of the most significant transformations of her life without too much disruption to anyone around her. This is not the natural order of things. It is a recent loss. The village is not a new invention. We are simply trying to bring back something that was always necessary.

Who this is for

The Mother's Village is for every woman who feels called to it, and I mean that without reservation. Whether you are trying to conceive, pregnant, newly postpartum or years into the experience of mothering, whether you have chosen not to have children and yet find something in this conversation that speaks to you, there is a place in this circle. If Matrescence is a universal feminine passage, as I believe it is, then the village that holds it belongs to all of us, and the only condition for being here is the feeling, however quiet or uncertain, that this is somewhere you are meant to be.

A note on why this post lives here

The Line Between and The Mother's Village are not two separate things running alongside each other but two expressions of the same belief. The transformation of becoming a mother deserves to be held with knowledge, presence and real respect, and that the women moving through it deserve more than silence and a six-week check. My doula and acupressure work holds women through that passage individually. The Mother's Village holds them together. Both exist for the same reason, which is also the simplest one: no woman should cross this threshold alone.

— Sabah, The Line Between · Beaufort, VIC

The Mother's Village gathers monthly in Beaufort, VIC.

Private Facebook community: facebook.com/share/g/1DWBt2eBrz/

Contact: themothersvillage@proton.me

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Sabah is a certified doula and acupressure therapist based in Beaufort, Victoria. Her practice, The Line Between, is rooted in the philosophy of matrescence, the profound transformation of becoming a mother that deserves to be held with knowledge, presence and deep respect. She came to this work through her own pre-conception journey and a deep conviction that matrescence is a universal feminine passage that every woman deserves to move through with community, language and care. She is also the founder of The Mother's Village, a monthly gathering circle for women on every part of the motherhood journey. She writes from the threshold as a practitioner, a thinker and a woman navigating this passage herself.

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