If This Is Your First Mother's Day as a Mother

If this is your first Mother’s Day as a mother, that means you welcomed a baby in the past year — the most collectively tumultuous and uncertain year in recent history.

You might be emerging from the haze of acute postpartum or still deep in it. Either way, you’re in the thick of a process known as matrescence. Described as the process of becoming a mother, matrescence encompasses the physical and psychological shifts that take place when entering into motherhood.

I think it’s important to have some awareness of matrescence as a concept — to be able to put a name to what might be uncomfortable and disorienting aspects of your current reality — and to have some insight into your own status in reckoning with it, because wherever you are in the process, whatever you’re currently struggling with is likely more universal than you realize.

Common components of matrescence

Matrescence is thought to typically involve these common components/challenges, as laid out by psychiatrist Alexandra Sacks:

Changing Family Dynamics

A new baby rearranges and creates a new family system and might activate issues related to your own upbringing.

Ambivalence

Having feelings that might seem contradictory about motherhood can be uncomfortable as well as create guilt. It’s okay to not be loving every second of it.

Fantasy vs. Reality

It is easy to build up expectations about what having a baby will be like. We are often at a loss when our reality is at odds with those expectations.

Guilt, Shame and “The Good Enough Mother”
We are quick to compare ourselves to others and what we’re doing never feels like enough. We can get lost in rigid routines, fueled by perfectionism and guilt.

I’ve come to embrace the idea that the question of whether someone will struggle with postpartum depression and/or anxiety is not really one of “if,” but “how much.” Of course, there are extremes to this experience that warrant a diagnosis of a perinatal mood and anxiety disorder and appropriate care and treatment. But the common contextual stressors and transformative psychological struggles new mothers experience are unavoidable to some degree.

The time after having a baby join your family is intensely challenging, even in the best of circumstances. There are too many external factors working against new mothers. In a time when what we need is slowness, space, healing, community, acceptance, support, we are often met with the opposite — lack of maternity leave and unsupportive workplaces, isolation by societal design, information overload, social comparison, unaddressed emotional labor and mental load, body image struggles.

So it is standard, not exceptional, to feel some degree of instability, dissociation, loss, overwhelm, and doubt. It is common to feel disconnected from the version of yourself you knew — distant from your personal and professional goals and identities, distant from your own body. If you feel like your identity has been fractured and you’re now expected to do a million different things at all times, none of them for yourself, you’re not wrong. The psychological tugging and tension are normal.

If this is your first Mother’s Day as a mother, know that becoming a mother is a process. It takes time to embody the role and integrate your shifting and evolving identities into a coherent sense of self. There is no single prescribed way to do it. You can define and practice motherhood as it makes sense to you. So take your time. You are becoming a new person. You’re in progress.