It’s hard to describe what it feels like to become a mum, but it has a name: matrescence

“Completely life-changing”. “Nothing could have fully prepared me”. These are the sorts of phrases you often hear from women when they become a mother.

These descriptions can point to the complexity and depth of the experience. It can be joyous and stressful, exhausting and euphoric, profound and mundane. It’s unlike any other life transition, and – try as we might – hard to capture in words or short phrases.

It turns out, though, there is a word for this process of becoming a mother: matrescence.

It’s a simple but powerful concept that’s changing the way we think about mothering. Here’s what matrescence means and how the concept can help mothers and those supporting them to navigate and understand this time of life.

Where did the term come from?

The term matrescence was coined in a 1973 essay^[1] by medical anthropologist Dana Raphael to describe the transition to motherhood. Raphael found most cultures had rites of passage that recognised “the time of mother-becoming”. However, Western countries such as the United States and Australia tended not to.

These practices, which vary depending on the cultural setting, have something in common. They acknowledge that, like adolescence, becoming a mother is a complex experience that brings a period of learning and transformation.

Raphael also coined the term “patrescence”, which, while not the focus of her study, recognised that fathers and other parents also go through a period of transition.

It would take decades, but matrescence made it into the public consciousness in 2017 in an article^[2] and widely-viewed TED Talk^[3] by reproductive psychiatrist Alexandra Sacks. Books^[4], podcasts^[5] and media coverage^[6] have abounded since.

What changes during matrescence?

Most public discussion of matrescence still tends to centre the challenges of mothering, for example postpartum depression and anxiety.

But there is increasing interest in the many kinds of changes experienced in matrescence, such as dramatic brain changes^[7] or the phenomenon of microchimerism^[8], where foetal cells from pregnancy can remain in the mother’s body, and vice versa.

Read more: Breastfeeding benefits mothers as much as babies, but public health messaging often only tells half of the story^[9]

Research on these phenomena matter not just scientifically, but philosophically^[10].

Other body changes include powerful hormonal changes^[11] in pregnancy, birth, and postpartum. There’s also research looking at how having children and breastfeeding can reduce the risk of breast cancer^[12].

Much of this research is emerging, which is unsurprising given historical and ongoing medical misogyny^[13].

More than physical changes

Mothers can also experience significant shifts in identity, including changes in personal values, new priorities^[14], or a sense of loss for other parts of themselves.

Mothers encounter new social dynamics and peer groups, too. The new social identities of “mother” or “mum” (or the markers “working mum” or “stay-at-home mum”) introduce new expectations, norms and ideals.

Relationship dynamics with partners, friends and family can shift significantly.

Mothers can also experience an expansive new relationship with their baby, though this might be sentimentalised or downplayed by others.

Other new emotional experiences, ranging from intense love and gratitude to “mum guilt^[15]” and “mum rage^[16]”, can arise, too, sometimes leading to maternal ambivalence^[17].

New sensory experiences such as breastfeeding and physical contact can lead mothers to feeling overstimulated or “touched out^[18]”, but can also bring joy.

Women also take on a new political and economic identity when becoming mothers. In 2025, mothers are often expected to remain ideal workers in the paid workforce, sometimes navigating a return to paid work while caring for an infant and performing the bulk of crucial unpaid reproductive household labour and care^[19].

This juggle can lead to maternal burnout^[20] and negative impacts on mothers’ wellbeing^[21].

This all contributes to the “motherhood penalty^[22]” – the well-documented, entrenched and persistent economic injustice experienced by mothers.

Matrescence is a term that helps to capture the breadth of these experiences in all their enormity and complexity.

The oppression of ‘motherhood’

Matrescence doesn’t happen in a vacuum. As Raphael’s original essay showed, it’s shaped by many cultural, economic, and political factors. It’s not the same for every mother.

In her 1976 landmark feminist study^[23] on mothering, North American writer and poet Adrienne Rich made the useful distinction between the experience of mothering and what she described as the patriarchal institution of motherhood.

It was the institution of motherhood, Rich argued, that oppressed mothers, not mothering itself. The flipside of this argument was that a liberating motherhood was possible under different conditions.