Matrescence: you didn't lose yourself after having a baby. You were being rebuilt.

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The internet has fallen in love with “matrescence” and this time, the zeitgeist is onto something real. A GP on the science of becoming a mother, why it rewires your brain, and why we mistake a developmental transition for a personal failing, writes Dr Rebekah Hoffman.

Every so often a word arrives that lets people finally name something they’ve felt for years, and suddenly it’s everywhere, starting in newspapers and online articles and spreading to the group chats, the podcasts, the captions of 2am feeding posts. Right now that word is matrescence. And unlike most wellness buzzwords, this one is earning its moment, because it describes something medicine, and society has been slow to take seriously: that becoming a mother is not a single moment in time, but it is a transformation.

The term isn’t new. It was coined in the 1970s by the anthropologist Dana Raphael, and it’s been recently revived to capture an idea both obvious and strangely radical, that the transition to motherhood is a developmental life stage, akin to adolescence but for mothers. Think about how we treat adolescence. We expect years of upheaval. We build whole fields of psychology, entire genres of film, around the messy business of a teenager becoming an adult. We don’t diagnose a 14-year-old as broken because she’s moody and unrecognisable; we understand she’s becoming. Matrescence asks for the same grace for the woman who has just had a baby, and encompasses, as one recent paper puts it, the “myriad psychological, social, cultural, and existential changes” of the transition into motherhood.

This transformation is visible in the brain. This is incredible. Matrescence changes your brain structure. In a landmark 2017 study, researchers scanned women before and after their first pregnancy and found pregnancy produces long-lasting changes in brain structure, reductions in grey matter in regions governing social cognition, the machinery of reading another person’s needs and states. The changes were so consistent the researchers could correctly identify, from a brain scan alone, which women had been pregnant. And this wasn’t damage: the degree of change predicted the strength of a mother’s attachment to her baby, and the remodelling endured for at least two years. Later work in 2024, using detailed scans across a single pregnancy mapped the changes week by week, finding “few regions untouched by the transition to motherhood.”

In other words: the fog, the disorientation, the sense of being a different person, these aren’t you failing to cope. They may be the outward signs of a brain physically reorganising itself for the hardest job it will ever do. “Mommy brain” isn’t a joke or a deficit; researchers now frame it as part of an adaptive process that also carries a heightened vulnerability to mental health difficulty, tangled up with the sheer executive load of running a small human’s entire life. Australian neuroscientists at Monash have gone further, arguing that this isn’t only about the newborn years, that the cognitive demands of motherhood shape the brain across the whole lifespan, potentially even building cognitive reserve into old age. Motherhood, on this view, is one of the most significant neurological events a human body goes through, and we’ve been treating it like a side quest to be juggled amongst career goals and self care as if it is another hobby.

Why does naming this matter so much? Because when women don’t have the word matrescence, they reach for the only frame we’ve given them, and too often that frame is “there’s something wrong with me.”

This is where I need to be careful and clear, because matrescence and postnatal depression are not the same thing, and conflating them helps no one. Matrescence is the normal, universal, sometimes brutal transition into motherhood, the personal identity shift, the ambivalence, the grief for your old self sitting right alongside overwhelming love. Postnatal depression is a diagnosable illness that affects around one in seven Australian women and needs treatment. The trouble is that without language for the first, women pathologise a normal transition, and just as dangerously some assume their genuine depression is “just how new motherhood feels” and never seek help. Understanding matrescence is what lets a woman tell the difference: is this the expected turbulence of becoming someone new, or is this the flat, joyless, frightening weather of an illness I should see someone about?

Both deserve support. Neither deserves shame. But we hand women a cultural script, the serene, fulfilled, effortlessly bonded “good mother” that matches nobody’s actual experience, and then let them privately conclude they’ve failed it. The ambivalence is normal. The loss of your old identity is real and worth grieving even as you adore your child. The invisible mental load, the being on call, of constantly being touched, the carrying of every appointment and preference and worry, is a genuine cognitive burden, not a character flaw or a sign you’re ungrateful.

So what do I do with matrescence in my consulting room? I use the right word at the right time. When a new mother sits down and says, carefully, that she doesn’t feel like herself, I can now tell her there’s a name for that, a whole science behind it, and that a reorganising brain and a dissolving-and-reforming sense of self are exactly what the transition involves. That reassurance is not a fob-off, it sits right beside the questions I still ask, gently, to make sure I’m not missing a depression or an anxiety disorder that needs treatment. Naming the normal is often what makes it safe for a woman to admit the not-normal.

If you’re in the thick of it right now, foggy, unmoored, mourning who you were while loving who you’re holding, know that you are not broken, and you are not alone. You are in the middle of one of the great human transformations, the one nobody warned you would feel like this. There’s a word for it. Use it, lean on the people around you, and if the weather turns dark rather than merely disorienting, please tell your GP. Becoming a mother remakes you. It was never supposed to be something you did quietly, alone, and without a single word for what was happening.

If you’re struggling with your mental health after having a baby, talk to your GP, or contact PANDA’s national helpline on 1300 726 306.

About the author

Dr Rebekah Hoffman is a Sydney GP, practice owner, researcher and Chair of the RACGP NSW and ACT Faculty. She works across clinical practice, research and health advocacy, with a particular interest in preventive health, women’s health, healthcare access and translating complex medical evidence into practical, everyday advice. The views expressed are her own and do not necessarily reflect those of the organisations with which she is affiliated.

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