Why nobody told you becoming a mother would feel like a loss

You were told about the stitches and the night feeds. Nobody told you that some of this would feel like a loss, and that the loss would sit directly beside the love without either one canceling out the other.

The information was never missing. Matrescence, meaning the developmental transition a woman goes through in becoming a mother, was named by the anthropologist Dana Raphael in 1973. There is a literature. Lucy Jones wrote a whole book about it in 2023.

Nobody is keeping it from you on purpose. It simply does not get handed on, and once I started looking at the reasons, they turned out to be more ordinary and more forgivable than I wanted them to be.

The curriculum ends at the birth

Look at what you were actually taught. Positions for labor. What a TENS machine does. How to fold a car seat, how to fit a nappy, how to hold a doll against a cushion and call it a feed.

Every one of those is useful and every one of them is about the first week. The last class I sat in finished with a discussion of the hospital bag. Then the course was over, and the course was over on the assumption that the difficult part was the part with an exit date.

The appointments that follow have the same shape. Somebody weighs the baby. Somebody asks whether feeding is established. There is a check at six weeks that is largely about your body and contraception, and if you are asked about your mood it is usually as a screen for illness, which is a different thing from being asked who you have become.

None of that is a scandal. It is a system built to keep two people alive, and it does that. It just leaves the identity part unattended, and unattended things get read as unimportant.

Everyone who could tell you has already rewritten it

This is the part I find hardest to argue with.

Ask a woman ten years out what the first year was like and you will usually get an anecdote rather than a state. The pram in the rain. The night he slept through and she woke anyway. What you rarely get is the flat interior weather of it, because she no longer has access to it.

People say this about the pain of labor and treat it as charming. This is personal observation rather than any claim about how memory works, but I think something similar happens to the rest of it. Not deletion exactly. More that the experience gets filed with a summary attached, and the summary is usually kind, and after enough years the summary is what she can actually reach.

I asked my mother about her own version of this when my son was about four months old. She thought about it and said I had been an easy baby and that she had loved that flat in Hackney. Both things are probably true. Neither of them was the answer to what I was asking, and I do not think she was avoiding me. I think the answer had been reorganised into something she could live beside.

So the transmission fails not because women are hiding it but because the people furthest through it are the least able to describe it, and the woman currently in the middle of it is the least able to speak.

Saying it out loud has a price

The price is not evenly spread and it is worth being specific about what it is.

Say it plainly at a table of people and one of two things tends to happen. Either you are corrected, gently, with a reminder of how much you wanted this and how well he is doing, which ends the conversation while appearing to comfort you. Or the room reallocates you. You become the one people ask about in a lowered voice, and the asking goes on for months, and it is not entirely warmth. Some of it is surveillance.

I have been on the receiving end of both and I am not sure which is worse. The correction makes you feel like a monster. The concern makes you feel like a case.

There is a third cost that I only noticed later. Say it in front of your partner and it arrives as an accusation about a decision you both made, whether or not you meant it that way. So you learn to keep it for the times when nobody can be implicated by it, and there are not many of those.

The silence that is meant kindly

The strongest reason for not telling a pregnant woman is the one I still cannot fully dismiss.

She has committed. The thing is already happening, there is nothing to reverse and nothing to prepare, so information that will only frighten her looks like cruelty with no payoff attached. Better to let her have the last calm weeks. Better not to be the one who spoiled it.

I understand that reasoning completely and I now think it is wrong, for one reason. What she would be receiving is not a warning. It is a name, arriving before she needs it, so that when she is awake at four in the morning wondering what is wrong with her, there is something already sitting in her head other than her own inadequacy.

The calm weeks are not actually calm anyway. She is already lying awake, she is already frightened, and what she is frightened of is unspecific. A named difficulty is easier to hold than a vague one, and I have never met anyone who was harmed by being told the truth in advance by somebody who loved them.

What I did in my own kitchen

A friend sat at my table at thirty-three weeks with a scan photo on her phone and asked me what the bit nobody tells you is.

I told her about a pump. I said the first three weeks are a blur, that everyone finds it a blur, and that the double electric one is worth the money. Then I put the kettle on again.

That was six weeks ago and I have been picking at it since. Some of it was protectiveness, and that is the version I told myself first because it is the flattering one. Some of it was that answering properly would have meant opening my own file in front of somebody who came round for a nice afternoon, and once opened I am not always able to close it neatly.

And underneath both, something smaller and less attractive. I wanted to be easy company. I wanted the visit to be light. Saying the true thing would have made me the heavy friend, and I was not willing to be that for an hour on a Thursday.

Every reason on that list is defensible on its own. Stacked up, they produce a woman lying awake in eleven weeks' time believing she is the only one, which is the outcome the whole chain of kindness was supposed to prevent.

Where this stops being my subject

One boundary needs stating plainly rather than tucked at the end.

What I am describing is the ordinary transition, the one that happens to women who are not unwell. Postnatal depression and postnatal anxiety are clinical conditions. They have criteria, they respond to treatment, and they are assessed by a doctor, a midwife or a psychologist rather than by a writer or by you.

If the weight does not lift, if you cannot function, if your own thoughts frighten you, the silence to break is not the one this piece is about. Please say it to somebody qualified. A vocabulary for the ordinary version must never become a reason to sit alone with something that is not ordinary.

What I would actually say now

She is due in five weeks. I have written the sentence down, which tells you I have not yet said it.

There is a part of this that has nothing to do with the baby and nothing to do with whether you are any good at it. You may lose track of who you are for a while. It is common enough to have a name, the name is matrescence, and if it happens to you it is not evidence that you have failed at something other women manage. Ring me at four in the morning. I will not be surprised and I will not think less of you.

That is ninety seconds of talking. Whether I will manage it, at the right moment, without hedging it into uselessness, I genuinely do not know. I have a history here.

What I have stopped believing is that my discomfort is a good enough reason. Every woman in that chain had a defensible motive, my mother included, and I have one too, and the total of all those defensible motives is that the word reached me four years late.

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