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# The name for what you're feeling
- URL: https://sacharusso.com.au/letters/the-name-for-what-youre-feeling/
- Published: 2026-09-29T02:28:12.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T10:17:57.000Z
- Description: Something shifted the moment you became a mother. There is a name for it.
- Author: Sacha Russo

Something shifted the moment you became a mother, and it did not stop at the 6 week check up or the first birthday. If you have felt like a different woman living in your own life since then, I want to give that feeling a name today.

It is called matrescence.

Just as adolescence describes the passage from child to adult, matrescence describes the passage from woman to mother. A medical anthropologist named Dana Raphael first named it in the 1970s, and decades later a clinical psychologist named Dr Aurélie Athan brought the word back into the light, drawing the same comparison: hormones shifting, the body changing shape, the whole sense of self reorganising itself, all at once.

Here is the part I most want you to hear. Matrescence does not touch one part of your life. It touches ALL of it. Physical. Hormonal. Emotional. Social. Cultural. Economic. Spiritual. Nobody warns us about most of these before the baby arrives. We are told about the sleepless nights and maybe the tears around day three, and that is about it.

And it does not end when the baby turns one. It keeps unfolding through every season, the toddler years, the school years, the teenage years, right through to the day the nest starts to empty.

Matrescence is also not a disease, and it is not the same thing as postnatal depression. If what you are feeling will not lift, please do talk to your doctor, that support matters and it is not weakness to ask for it. But if what you are carrying is more a quiet unravelling, a sense of not quite yourself that nobody prepared you for, that is not something wrong with you. That is matrescence, doing exactly what it is meant to do.

So much of the hard part comes from expectations we never even chose. The idea of what a GOOD mother looks like sits in us unconsciously, long before we ever held a baby. Most of us carry it in without knowing we packed it.

You did not fail. You are not behind. You are in the middle of one of the biggest transitions a woman moves through, and it deserves far more room than the world has given it.

So here is my invitation for this week, small and doable. Choose one: sit still for 5 quiet minutes with a cup of tea before anyone else in the house is awake. Or call a friend and ask her to walk with you, just the two of you, no destination. Or find one other woman and simply say the word matrescence out loud to her, and watch what happens when she recognises herself in it too.

We were never meant to do this alone.

I would love to know. Hit reply and tell me, does this word fit what you have been feeling?

With love,  
Sacha x