The invisible revolution of early motherhood

Matrescence is the developmental transition of becoming a mother, and it is happening at this moment, in separate flats and separate kitchens, to a very large number of women who cannot see one another. That last part is the whole strange fact of it.

Every adult you have ever met came out of a woman who then went through some version of this. A meaningful share of the women you passed in the street today have done it, are doing it, or will. It is one of the most widely distributed experiences a human being can have.

And it is handled as a private domestic matter. Not by anyone's decision. By default, and by an accumulation of small structural facts that are worth laying out beside each other.

Other transitions got buildings

Adolescence is a useful comparison because it is the transition that was taken seriously.

There is an institution organized around it. Teenagers spend the years of the change in a room with thirty other people making the same change at the same rate, with adults whose job includes knowing what those years do to a person. There is a curriculum. There is a research field. There is an entire genre of novels and films whose subject is nothing but a young person becoming someone else.

The vocabulary reaches ordinary people, which is the part that matters most. When a fifteen year old goes silent for a fortnight and slams a door, nobody in the house concludes she is broken. They have a frame ready. She is going through something, the something has a name, and the name arrives before the behavior does.

Retirement got infrastructure of a different kind. It got an industry. There are advisers, seminars, a whole category of financial product, and a phrase, retirement planning, that everybody understands without a gloss. The identity question is even pre-loaded into the small talk. People ask a man about to retire what on earth he will do with himself all day, and they ask it lightly, but they are asking about exactly the thing.

Both of those transitions are surrounded by scaffolding that was built before the individual arrives at them.

Everything built around a new mother points at the baby

The scaffolding around early motherhood is real and substantial. It is simply aimed somewhere else.

Count the appointments. Almost all of them are the baby's. The baby is weighed, measured, plotted on a chart, and the numbers go in a little book you carry. There is a great deal of institutional attention in that room and the mother is the person holding the child still.

Look at the shelf. The books about this period are shelved under parenting, which is a section addressed to a caregiver about a third party. A book about the woman's own identity, if it exists, sits next to a book about weaning. Adolescence has a place in developmental psychology, on its own terms, as a thing that happens to a person rather than a manual for managing somebody else.

Even the language for the period is baby-indexed. Newborn, four months, weaning, the terrible twos. The units of time are the child's developmental stages, so a mother describing her own year has no calendar to describe it on except his.

Personal observation rather than anything established: I think this is why so much of what women say about that year comes out as logistics. There is a well-developed vocabulary available for the baby's state and almost none for hers, so the sentences arrive in the language that exists.

The transition has no cohort

This is the structural feature I keep returning to, because it explains the invisibility better than anything else.

Adolescents do their transition collectively and publicly. Same age, same building, same five years, in front of each other. Even the humiliating parts are witnessed by people the same distance in. You cannot believe you are the only one when the evidence is sitting at the next desk.

New mothers do theirs alone and staggered. Your neighbor had hers three years ago, your sister will have hers next year, the woman upstairs is nine months ahead. Nobody is at your point at your moment, and even if she were, you are both indoors.

The one place where a cohort does assemble is organized around the babies. Groups are formed by the child's age, they meet to discuss the child, and the conversation runs on feeding, sleeping and grams. That is a genuine cohort of women in the middle of the same enormous event, discussing the weights of their children. I sat in those rooms for the better part of two years.

Around eleven weeks into the group after my son was born, one woman said, in the car park, on the way to her car, that she did not feel like a person any more. Four of us were standing there. Every one of us said something reassuring and then we all went home. I have thought about that car park more than anything that was said inside the building.

A concept can be fifty years old and still need explaining

There is a rough test for whether an idea has arrived: whether an ordinary person can use the word without stopping to define it.

Adolescence passes that test easily. G. Stanley Hall gave it a two volume treatment in 1904, and within a couple of generations the idea that the teenage years are a distinct developmental stage had moved into schools, parenting advice and ordinary conversation. Nobody explains the word now. It is furniture.

Dana Raphael named matrescence in 1973. Half a century on, I cannot say it at a dinner table without adding a sentence of explanation, and I have never once been in a room where somebody else used it first. Aurélie Athan has worked on it at Columbia. Alexandra Sacks has written about the push and pull of it. Lucy Jones published a book in 2023 that a lot of people read. The idea is not fringe. It has just not become furniture.

An experience that has no word in general circulation cannot be counted, compared, taught or expected. Individually, each woman is left to explain her own state from first principles, at the point in her life when she has the least capacity to explain anything.

Where this stops being a structural question

One thing is not a matter of scaffolding, and it needs saying plainly.

Postnatal depression and postnatal anxiety are clinical conditions, distinct from the ordinary transition. They have diagnostic criteria and they respond to treatment, and they are assessed by a doctor, a midwife or a psychologist. If the weight does not lift at all, if you cannot function, if your own thoughts frighten you, that is not an argument about institutions. That is a same week conversation with somebody qualified, and I am not qualified.

What I am genuinely unsure about

Whether any of this could be built, and whether it should be.

Part of me suspects the invisibility is not entirely an oversight. The transition happens at night, indoors, in private, in a body, attached to feelings that are difficult to say in front of the person they concern. Some of that may resist being institutionalised no matter what anyone does with it.

And I am wary of the version where it gets built badly. A curriculum for this could very easily become another set of expectations to fall short of, another form to fill in, another performance assessed at six weeks. Women in that year are already being measured against a great many standards. I do not want to have argued for one more.

So I am not calling for anything. I am noticing a gap and finding it strange that a gap this size is so quiet.

What to carry

Go back to the waiting room, because it is the clearest image I have.

Six or seven women, sitting in a row with prams, all of them somewhere inside the largest change of their adult lives, talking about grams. Every one of them, I would guess, privately convinced that the difficulty is specific to her. Not one of us said so.

The scale is the part worth holding onto. Whatever you are in the middle of, the arithmetic makes it very unlikely that you are the exception, and rather more likely that you are one of a very large number of people doing the same thing at the same time in different rooms, in silence, for no reason anybody chose.

If you want the rest of what I write about this, I send it out as I go. No schedule, nothing to buy.