During pregnancy and early motherhood, women undergo seismic psychological and physiological changes, yet this life-altering transition is neglected by society. Now the emerging concept of ‘matresence’, like adolescence, is opening up a new conversation about the bind of modern motherhood, helping to birth a new mothering culture

Before I had my first child, I had little idea about what becoming a mother would entail. I thought pregnancy was a straightforward physical process with a few ‘hormonal’ days. I thought that I would still be the same person when she was born. The experience of motherhood from a mother’s perspective hadn’t interested me before, I thought it was boring, banal. The proper work happened in an office. Most of us regard it this way: just look at that prefix in “just a stay-at-home mum”. I was overjoyed to be pregnant, but I realized, as the baby grew, that I had picked up strange notions about the value of the work of mothering. It’s no surprise: care work in our society is undervalued, unsupported, and disavowed.

In fact, it would be the wildest, hardest, most enlivening, and extreme psychological, existential, social, physical, and socio-political experience of my life.

When the baby was born, I had an uncanny sense that the old me was dead. I found this disturbing. I had gone, but I didn’t know where. My brain and patterns of thought felt different as if I had been rewired. I was expected to breeze through new motherhood, to ‘bounce back’ and crack on as normal. But I felt as if I’d been cracked open. After a gnarly birth and struggles with breastfeeding, hardcore sleep deprivation and the stress of looking after a newborn, mostly on my own – as is the way in our society – began to take a toll on my mind. But I was told to enjoy every minute. What on earth was wrong with me?

Around that time, I happened upon a word in an article written by a reproductive psychiatrist called Alexandra Sacks. It brought together everything I was feeling. Matrescence.

“The process of becoming a mother, which anthropologists call ‘matrescence’, has been largely unexplored in the medical community,” Sacks wrote. The word was like adolescence, and described the emotional, physical, and identity changes having a child triggers.

The idea that what I was feeling was normal filled me with relief. As a science journalist, I started to research the new and growing field of the parental brain. I was shocked by what I found.

Neuroscientists have found that the impact of pregnancy on the brain
is as significant as the impact of adolescence

After childhood and adolescence, there is no other time in an adult human’s life course that entails such dramatic psychological and physical change as matrescence.

In a landmark study published in Nature in 2016, researchers provided evidence, for the first time, that pregnancy renders pronounced changes in brain structure. Soon after, neuroscientists found that the impact of pregnancy on the brain is as significant as the impact of adolescence.

I learned about ‘zombie cells’. During pregnancy, cells are exchanged between the mother and foetus via the placenta. When the baby is born, some of those cells remain intact in the mother’s body. For decades. Perhaps forever. The phenomenon is called microchimerism. The exchange creates what leading geneticist Dr. Diana Bianchi calls a “permanent connection which contributes to the survival of both individuals.”

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