Becoming a mother changes everything—not just your daily routine, but your sense of self.
For many women, motherhood is a seismic shift in identity, one that can feel both grounding and disorienting. The roles and identities you once held—career woman, partner, friend, creative, athlete — are suddenly put under review, sharing space or feel like they have been overtaken by an all-consuming new title: Mum.
This transition isn’t just about learning how to mother: the activities of changing nappies or navigating sleep routines and feeding. It’s Matrescence.
Matrescence describes the developmental process of becoming a mother. It’s a time of change on almost every level: physical, hormonal, economic, social, emotional and spiritual. Like adolescence, it’s a time where we question who we are and try on a few different identities before we come through the other end with a new sense of self. A time where friendships and relationships change, our values change, and our capacity changes. An often messy, bumpy and confusing time — an identity crisis.
Before motherhood, your identity may have been built on your career pathway, your role in your family of origin, a hobby or skill you have, or your independence. Moving through Matrescence challenges these, it turns them upside down and can leave you feeling, invisible, lost, and missing your old life.
Society sells this idea that our maternal instincts will kick in effortlessly. However, becoming a mother is a skill, one that needs to be taught, to be reviewed and reflected upon with others. When these “instincts” don’t kick in as we expected we can be left with a sense of shame, pressure, and being an imposter. So, at a time of deep shifts, of unravelling and relearning instead of being given grace and understanding, our experience can be one of feeling unseen and unheard, adding to our confusion and sounding like:
“I don’t even know who I am anymore”
“Do I even know what I’m doing?”
“What’s wrong with me”
This confusion, this sense of displacement, is not a failure—it’s part of the transformation. The tension between who you were and who you are becoming doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong; it means you’re doing it deeply.
You might grieve parts of your former experiences while simultaneously feeling guilty for that grief. You might love your child fiercely yet resent the way motherhood has rewritten your boundaries, your time, your body. You might scroll through old photos and barely recognize yourself, or catch a glimpse in the mirror and wonder where ‘you’ went. These contradictions make you human.
Matrescence isn’t a linear journey. Some days, you’ll feel like you’ve found your footing; other days, the ground will drop away again. You’ll meet versions of yourself in the quiet moments—the exhausted one, the joyful one, the one who surprises herself with her own strength. Slowly, a new identity will emerge, one you have created that holds new and old parts of you.
Navigating the shift
A tired and tested strategy and one I found helpful in my own Matrescence was to name what I felt I had lost or was grieving since becoming a mother. Here are some journal prompts to guide you in this. This free resource supports you to name and explore your experience as you go through this transformation.
You aren’t losing yourself—you’re in the messy, sacred process of becoming someone new. And that someone still belongs to you.
Start Your Journey
You’re Not Alone
Whether motherhood has been filled with certainty, doubt, or quiet reinvention, the days of figuring out who you now are can be hard and are not meant to be sat in alone. They shape who you are becoming.
You can start exploring your own identity shifts in motherhood today. Download our free journal prompt sheet or reach out for a 15-minute enquiry call to explore how this work might support you.