Nobody told you that you would grieve yourself. That the person you were before — the one with a career identity, a social life, a body that felt like yours, a Saturday morning that belonged to no one — would feel like someone who had gone somewhere without you. That motherhood, even loved motherhood, even chosen motherhood, could feel like a loss you weren’t prepared for because you didn’t know there was something to mourn.
What matrescence is
The anthropologist Dana Raphael coined the term ‘matrescence’ in 1973 to describe the developmental transition into motherhood — a transformation she argued was comparable in scope to adolescence, involving profound shifts in identity, body, relationships, and sense of self. The concept has been expanded in recent decades, most notably by developmental psychologist Aurelie Athan, who argues that matrescence is a neurological as well as psychological shift — the brain literally rewires around parenthood.
Understanding that what you’re experiencing is a developmental transition — not a failure to adjust, not ingratitude, not a sign that you made the wrong choice — changes the frame significantly. You are not the same person you were before. This is normal. The disorientation of becoming someone new is the process, not the problem.
What you might be grieving
The freedom of unscheduled time. The ability to leave the house in two minutes. The capacity to think a thought to its end without interruption. A relationship with your partner that was two people rather than a management structure. A body that felt like yours. A professional identity unqualified by absence. Sleep. The ability to be unreliable in ways that only affected you.
These are real losses. Naming them doesn’t mean you regret the choice that occasioned them — it means you’re being honest about what the choice cost. Both are true: this was the right choice, and it changed things you valued.
The complicated math of identity
Motherhood doesn’t erase who you were; it adds something enormous to it. But the addition is not seamless. The previous identity doesn’t simply expand to accommodate the new one — it shifts, reorganises, sometimes feels temporarily lost under the weight of the new demands. The research on maternal identity shows that the integration of the mother-identity with the pre-existing self is a process that takes months to years, not weeks.
If you are in the earlier part of this process and feeling the dissonance between who you were and who you are — you are in a normal, temporary developmental passage. The person you were is still in there. They are being reorganised around something new.
What helped others
Keeping one thing from your previous life with genuine commitment. Not a gesture toward your old self but a real, regular, protected thing: a run on Sunday mornings, a monthly dinner with a close friend without children, an hour per week for a creative practice that has nothing to do with babies. The specificity matters. ‘Keeping yourself’ as an abstraction doesn’t work as well as one concrete anchor.
Matrescence is a recognised developmental transition
The anthropologist Dana Raphael coined the term matrescence in 1973 to describe the developmental transition to motherhood — a process as physiologically and psychologically significant as adolescence, but with none of the cultural acknowledgement adolescence receives. The neurological changes are real: MRI studies show measurable grey matter changes in the maternal brain during pregnancy and the postpartum period, specifically in regions involved in social cognition and the processing of others’ needs. These changes are not damage — they appear to represent specialisation. But they also mean that the person on the other side of becoming a mother is genuinely not identical to the person before. Grieving the pre-maternal self is not ingratitude for the child. It is an accurate response to a real transformation.
When grief becomes something more
The grief of losing your pre-baby identity is a legitimate experience, not a symptom. But if what you are feeling includes persistent hopelessness, inability to find pleasure in anything, thoughts that things would be better if you were not here, or a sense of complete disconnection from your life — please speak to your GP or midwife. These are symptoms of postnatal depression, which is treatable. The PANDAS Foundation helpline (0808 1961 776) provides specialist perinatal mental health support. The Samaritans are available at any hour on 116 123.
Related Reading
- I hated being pregnant — and that’s allowed
- Postnatal anxiety: how it differs from PND and how to get help
- Nobody told me postpartum would feel like this
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