Willow Reed

ma.tres.cence

/muh-TRES-uhns/noun

The transition a woman moves through when she becomes a mother. The disorientation. The grief for who she was. The slow arrival of someone she has not met. Nobody hands you the word for it. There is one.

There's a word for what you're feeling.
You didn't lose yourself. You became someone else.

Read the wordsAbout Willow

The word was coined in 1973 by Dana Raphael, an American anthropologist, working from a Columbia doctorate supervised by Margaret Mead. It has been in circulation, quietly, ever since.

In this book

  • Matrescence

    What the word means, where it came from, and why having it available changes what you are able to think.

  • Losing Yourself

    The self you grieve when you become a mother, and the one who is arriving in her place. This is the chapter I started with, because it is the one I could not find.

  • Other Thresholds

    The other passages nobody names. Grieving a parent who is still alive. Holding both ends of a family at once. Caring until the caring has swallowed the person doing it.

Contents

Three chapters

I write in three chapters. They are not stages and you do not pass through them in order.

  1. Matrescence

    What the word means, where it came from, and why having it available changes what you are able to think.

    14 entries

  2. Losing Yourself

    The self you grieve when you become a mother, and the one who is arriving in her place. This is the chapter I started with, because it is the one I could not find.

    8 entries

  3. Other Thresholds

    The other passages nobody names. Grieving a parent who is still alive. Holding both ends of a family at once. Caring until the caring has swallowed the person doing it.

    6 entries

From the notebook

All of it

The last few things I wrote.

  1. Other Thresholds8 min

    Sandwich generation meaning, and why it lands differently the second decade

    The sandwich generation means one adult caring for a child and an aging parent at the same time. What the definition does not contain is a length.

  2. Matrescence15 min

    The language gap: why English took until 1973 to name matrescence

    English has had a word for becoming an adult since the fifteenth century. It got one for becoming a mother in 1973, then barely used it for forty years.

  3. Other Thresholds9 min

    Caregiver identity and the invisible labor nobody counts

    The labor has a name. It has had several since 1987, published in real journals by women who saw it clearly. Naming it did not get it counted.

The shelf

Four things

Four things I made, because the writing kept running past the end of a post.

A workbook

The Becoming

Structured prompts for naming what is happening to you, and for going through it rather than around it.

US$39

One time. Yours to keep.

A guided journal

Field Notes

Unhurried pages with enough prompting to hold a thought, and no more than that.

US$39

One time. Yours to keep.

An AI reflection space

Mirror

Somewhere to think aloud about who you are now, at whatever hour the question turns up.

US$19/mo · US$149/yr

US$19 a month, or US$149 a year. You choose at checkout. Subscriptions can be canceled at any time from inside the member portal. You keep access until the end of the period you have paid for, and you will not be billed again.

A library and a guide

New Ground

A written foundation, and a guide for the self you are building next.

US$19/mo · US$149/yr

US$19 a month, or US$149 a year. You choose at checkout. Subscriptions can be canceled at any time from inside the member portal. You keep access until the end of the period you have paid for, and you will not be billed again.

All four, and The Threshold, come together in The Complete Passage. It is an annual subscription. It costs US$249 a year and it renews each year at US$249 until you cancel. The Threshold comes no other way.

The night page

At 3am it doesn't have a name yet.

Mirror is somewhere to think aloud until it does.