When I had my first baby, I was working full-time as a midwife. Everyone told me, when you have a baby you are just a mum and all your knowledge will become irrelevant. The stubbornness and ridiculousness in that seemed absolutely crazy to me. I know about babies, I see postnatal women everyday. In my mind, I just needed to make it past 6 weeks.
I could practically look after a newborn (nappies, changing, bathing) however I was not prepared to be smacked in the face by the postnatal period. It truly was like nothing I had experienced. Also, why did no one tell me?!
Humble pie straight to the face.
I was sad, overwhelmed, angry and hating myself - all thrown in with sleep deprivation and a vulnerability that can only be described as debilitating.
Driving around in my car with my take away coffee was my only solace. I could listen to podcasts and I briefly felt like myself again for a little while. But then I would get out of the car and all those feelings would come flooding back in.
Then I discovered it…matrescence. In one of my podcasts (obvs).
It turns out, the process of transitioning to motherhood has an actual term. This huge weight was lifted off my shoulders. I finally felt like I could see and understand what was happening to me.
It is often likened to adolescence- it just happens to you. You remember adolecence? Your a bit awkward, the hormones are whack and you smell weird. It’s basically the same again, but now you have a baby to look after too.
There is only so long that you can keep going on and feeling like this for, but there is just such little information out there. So I have gone down a bit of a rabbit hole of reading to understand myself, and hopefully help others to do the same thing.
We love those little people we have created, but boy oh boy, what happens to us as women is something we just don’t talk about enough. If I can help as many people as possible understand this process then that makes me a happy chappy, because this information has really helped me.
I have thought about matrescence and the postnatal period a lot, and my observation is that motherhood (matrescence) is the crossroads of many interconnected parts.
-
Your own childhood experiences
-
Society's expectations of you
-
Social Media
-
Your birth (and any trauma you may carry with that)
-
Hormones
When I went back to work after my first baby I clearly remember a couple coming in for an assessment and it was their first baby. As you do, they asked ‘what’s your advice for us’. I said to them, what no one tells you is how quickly your own childhood stuff will come up. Like a volcano that is going to erupt and everyone needs to evacuate. They were not expecting that. But I feel like everyone talks about sleep deprivation and your time isn’t your own again…but no one talks about this and it’s a HUGE hidden part of parenting.
Then comes society’s expectations of you. Everyone has their own advice and concerns about your baby. Which I think should all be taken with a grain of salt and our own intuition can be more helpful instead, but that’s for another day.
Social Media is B.A.N.A.N.A.S. It can be such a beautiful place where you can find others that you really resonate with, but the comparison that comes with other mums on the internet can be a wild time. How often have you looked at social media (both known influencers and your own friends) and thought I really don’t have it together. Then you spiral out of control with racing thoughts about how stupid you are and they love their baby more than you. It’s not true. We only put on social media the nice and beautiful moments. Not the moments you are crying on the floor because your baby/child has screamed for hours and you are at absolute capacity. No one shows that, but I promise you aren’t doing it wrong. They aren’t perfect. They don’t have perfect kids.
How you birthed your baby, and any trauma that may have happened from your pregnancy, labour and birth can take time to process. But once you have a baby you hit the ground running and one issue flows into the next and into the next. Do you ever get time to actually process it, and women rarely are debriefed properly after their births. Gosh I wish this was standard. Not just a quick debrief in the hospital the next day, but in the weeks after. Again and again if needed.
Your hormones also take on a life of their own. I think it is really common to be aware of the day 3 ‘baby blues’ and we are often encouraged to seek help if they continue but it’s really hard to reach out. I get it. I was you. But I also feel that our hormones can wreak havoc on us long after day 3. More information and understanding on our hormones is so important because I think it explains a lot, but it’s hard to find concrete evidence to something we probably all feel.
This new identity, mother, can be such a difficult adjustment even if you were pregnant and knew it was coming for 9 months. The integration of your old self to your new self whilst also looking after a new baby, or even if your babies are older now, is such a process and it can feel despairing to get lost in all of that.
Typically I find that matrescence manifests in these questions:
1) Who am I now?
2) Why do I feel like this?
3) Why can’t I seem to get my s**t together?
Not only did you birth your baby, but you have birthed a new version of yourself and that can be really difficult to navigate, and it feels isolating.
“But at the very centre of our souls, and in every cell of our body we change. We transform. We are different. You can feel it.” (Amy Taylor-Kabbaz ‘Mama Rising’).
For a lot of women, our whole lives, we have been taught to push and grind and hustle. We can do it like the boys, and mostly we have succeeded to gain financial freedom. I am not saying that is necessarily a bad thing, but in doing so, we have been busy. So busy.
Motherhood may be the first time you actually stop and are with yourself. And maybe for a lot of us, we don’t actually like ourselves. So all of a sudden you have this pressure from social media, society wants you to just get on with it, you may be having terrible flashbacks from your birth, and then you are so triggered you are filled with rage you didn’t know existed - all whilst having your beautiful baby that takes up a lot of your space.
It’s scary not knowing your place in the world anymore. Every day can be a grind, you cry a lot (maybe A LOT) and you have possibly thought of leaving your partner to raise your babies in a cult of women as a more ideal option. We lose control, we have to sit with our own selves and it’s potentially terrifying.
Our Mumma Bear Amy says “There can be no growth without pain, as harsh as that sounds. When something changes form, there is a shedding of the old. That’s physics. That’s reality. And that’s matrescence”.
It’s all a bit more spiritual than we were expecting.
But if you choose to sit quietly with yourself, you will find the new beautiful you.
We watch our babies become beautiful new souls, why do we think we aren’t worthy of becoming a beautiful new soul too?
We are given the choice, through our babies, to chose whether to lean into matrescence (motherhood), or to continue to moving forward but potentially not becoming the best person for ourselves or our children. That opportunity to lean in and create an exceptional person is amazing.
I don’t think I know the most in-depth information about matrescence, but I do think it is important and it explains so much about what I went through. If we know more, we can do more.
You are beautiful, and capable of more than you know. And you are worth finding your new self.
I would love to hear from you, and hear your story!
When you had your baby did you feel the same?
What was your experience?
Talk soon, Em x
Leave a comment