A wanted baby and a difficult transition are not contradictions.
Matrescence describes the internal process of becoming a mother: not only learning to care for a baby, but adapting to changes in identity, relationships, autonomy, attention and the body.
In this audio essay, I explore why motherhood may feel disorientating even when your baby was deeply wanted—and why missing parts of your former life does not mean that you regret the life you now have.
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The complete transcript appears below, lightly edited for clarity.
When your life no longer feels entirely familiar
There can be a strange moment in early motherhood when you look around at your life and realise that although it’s still yours, it doesn’t feel entirely familiar.
Perhaps someone else is holding the baby and you have a rare hour to yourself. You’ve been waiting for this. You’re probably thinking about everything you would do if you could just have a little uninterrupted time. And then the moment arrives. And you don’t quite know what to do with it.
Should you sleep, have a shower, reply to the messages gathering on your phone, eat something, leave the house?
Maybe make a cup of tea. You sit down and before you’ve even taken more than a few sips, you hear the baby crying and your body responds before you’ve even decided whether you need to go to them.
The tea goes cold, obviously. Cold tea may not be an official developmental stage of motherhood, but perhaps it should be.
And none of this means that you don’t love your baby. You may have wanted them for years. You might look at them and feel a kind of love that’s almost impossible to explain. You may be deeply grateful that they’re here.
And still there may be moments when you miss your old life. Or you miss yourself.
If that feels difficult to admit, even privately, I want to begin here. A wanted baby and a difficult transition are not contradictions.
When gratitude becomes a reason to stay quiet
Maybe no one said that gratitude is the only feeling that you’re allowed to have. Sometimes the pressure comes from other people. And sometimes it comes from our own expectations of how we should be.
The baby’s here. This is what I wanted. So, why am I not simply happy?
This can feel especially complicated if your baby was longed for after fertility treatment, pregnancy loss, or a difficult journey to conception. You may find yourself using gratitude to silence every other feeling. I wanted this, so I shouldn’t feel overwhelmed. I’m fortunate, so I shouldn’t miss my freedom. My baby’s healthy, so I shouldn’t be struggling.
But gratitude doesn’t cancel out exhaustion, uncertainty, grief, or anger. It can sit right beside all of them.
You don’t become ungrateful simply because part of this is harder than you expected. You haven’t merely added a baby to the life you already had. Your routines, relationships, and sense of yourself may all be changing at once. And that is a lot for one person to absorb, even when the change is deeply wanted.
Understanding Matrescence
There’s a word for this transition: matrescence. It describes a process of becoming a mother, not only giving birth or learning to care for a baby, but what’s happening within you as you become somebody’s mother.
You may have prepared carefully for pregnancy and birth. You may have researched prams and feeding and sleep and made lists of things to buy. And perhaps you learned to change a nappy on a plastic doll with very little commitment to realism.
But who prepared you for the internal change?
Your baby arrives visibly. Everyone can see that a new person is here. What is happening within you can be much harder to see. Your priorities will shift. Your relationships may look different. And even your experience of time can change. You may feel expanded one day and completely unsettled the next. Sometimes both within the same hour.
Matrescence isn’t a diagnosis and it isn’t another way of saying that motherhood is inherently traumatic. It’s simply a name for a significant human transition.
Sometimes having a name helps. It creates another possibility. Perhaps you’re not failing to return to normal. Perhaps you’re still finding your way through something new.
More has changed than the arrival of the baby
Let’s go back to that cup of tea. Before the baby, making it probably required very little thought. You noticed that you wanted one, put the kettle on, and drank it.
Now, that same small act may depend on whether the baby’s asleep, whether they can be put down, whether someone else is available, whether you’ve remembered to eat, and whether by the time you reach the kettle, you can still remember why you walked into the kitchen.
The tea itself isn’t the issue. It’s what that ordinary moment can represent.
Your needs haven’t disappeared, but meeting them now may require planning, negotiation, or another person taking over.
You can be technically off duty while some part of you remains alert to the baby. You might leave the house alone and still find yourself checking the time, wondering when they last fed, or listening for a cry that couldn’t possibly be coming from three streets away.
And then there’s the interruption. A thought that begins, but you don’t get to finish it. You start a task and somebody needs you and the remains of that task are still waiting several hours later. Your day can feel incredibly full, yet when someone asks what you did, it’s difficult to explain.
So if you don’t feel completely settled in your life yet, perhaps that makes sense. More than one part of it has been rearranged.
Your body, your attention, your autonomy, your sleep, your relationship with your partner, your confidence, your work, your sense of time.
You don’t need to examine all of these today, but it matters to recognise the scale of what you’re adapting to.
Disorientation isn’t the same as regret
Sometimes saying, “I miss who I was before the baby,” can sound uncomfortably close to saying, “I wish the baby hadn’t arrived.” But those are not the same thing.
You can miss a freedom you once had without wishing your child away. You can need time away from your baby and find yourself missing them almost as soon as you get it.
You might feel proud of what your body’s done and uncomfortable with how unfamiliar it now feels. You might still love your partner and feel furious they appear to be able to shower without submitting a written proposal forty-eight hours in advance. And you can be capable and decisive in the rest of your life while feeling surprisingly unsure of yourself here.
Perhaps you’ve caught yourself wondering, “If I’m relieved to be away from my baby, am I even attached properly? If I resent what motherhood has cost me, do I appreciate what it’s given me?
If I’m struggling, was I ever really ready for this?”
These questions can feel scary because they treat one feeling as evidence against the other. But love, it doesn’t protect us from disruption. And sometimes love is part of what makes the disruption so profound. This person matters so much that their arrival changes almost everything. Feeling the force of that change doesn’t mean you regret it.
This transition happens in a body
All of this is happening in a body. A body that may have carried a pregnancy and given birth. A body that may be healing from tearing, stitches, or surgery. A body dealing with bleeding, feeding, hormonal changes, pain, and interrupted sleep.
And while all of that is happening, this same body is responding to a baby who needs care around the clock.
So when you think, “I don’t feel like myself,” it may be about identity and meaning and the enormity of becoming somebody’s mother.
But it may also be the experience of a person who hasn’t slept for more than a few consecutive hours, hasn’t eaten enough today, is physically recovering, and hasn’t been alone for ten minutes. Often, it’s both.
Not everything should be treated as a problem with your mindset. Sometimes you need time to understand what this experience means to you.
And sometimes you need a meal, medical care, several hours of sleep, or another adult to take genuine responsibility.
So alongside asking, “What’s happening to my sense of self?” you might ask something more immediate:
“What is my body being asked to carry at the moment? And is it receiving enough support to carry it?”
What do you actually miss?
“Maybe I’ve lost myself” is the closest language you have for the feeling. It’s a powerful statement, but it’s also a very large one. It can make the problem feel permanent and almost impossible to respond to.
So I wonder what you mean when you say it. What feels genuinely different now? What do you miss?
Do you miss the person you used to be or something that person had access to? Perhaps you miss friends who know you beyond motherhood. Maybe you miss being absorbed in your work, moving your body, making something or finishing a thought while it still belongs to you.
Perhaps you need four uninterrupted hours. Not four hours where you remain responsible from another room, but four hours where somebody else notices what needs to be done and gets on with it.
Maybe you need to speak about the birth. Or perhaps you’re not ready to return to something yet. Despite the pressure to prove that you’re still ambitious, sociable, or unchanged, you don’t need to solve all of that now.
Naming what’s missing may simply make the feeling more contained and less unwieldy and in turn maybe a little easier to respond to.
Some parts of you may be present, but haven’t had much room recently. Some parts may return in a different form. And there may be parts of you emerging now that you haven’t met before.
Motherhood can also change what you see when you look back. You may think differently about your own childhood, your relationship, or how accustomed you are to being the capable one. You don’t need to analyse every feeling or pull every relationship apart, but for now, noticing may be enough.
When you may need more support
There is one distinction I want to make here. Not every unfamiliar or uncomfortable feeling in matrescence needs to be fixed or treated. Adjustment can be messy without being an illness.
But I also don’t want to use matrescence to explain away distress. If anxiety is staying with you or beginning to shape your daily life, if a birth experience continues to intrude, if previous traumas are resurfacing, or if that sense of disconnection isn’t easing with time, rest, or practical support, you deserve more help with it.
And if you’re frightened by your thoughts, struggling to function, or worried that you or your baby may not be safe, please seek medical help promptly. You don’t need to wait until things become unbearable.
A final thought
If you love your baby and you’re finding this transition difficult, you’re not failing at gratitude.
Missing parts of your former life does not mean that you’ve chosen the wrong one.
You may not have lost yourself. You may simply be finding your way into a life that has changed more profoundly than you expected.
A wanted baby and a difficult transition are not contradictions. Both can be true.
I’m Elizabeth. This is Origin Within.
If this experience feels familiar and you would like a private space to explore what motherhood has stirred within you, you can learn more about The Inner Room