I remember sitting in middle school health class and learning all about puberty and our changing bodies. We were taught about our fluctuating hormones and how these hormones work to change our bodies. We learned how hormones can make us moody or irritable. We learned, from the awkward nightmare that high school can be, that this change also affects us socially as we are trying to figure out who we are and where we fit in.
But damn, why didn’t anyone tell us that we’d be going through all of this again in adulthood?
In the 1970s, anthropologist Dana Raphael coined the term Matrescence to refer to the process of coming into motherhood. Later, Aurélie Athan, PhD, revived the term in an effort to view this transition from a bio-psycho-social framework and reduce the pathologizing of the motherhood experience.
Understanding that this is a necessary shared experience of the transition into motherhood allows us to destigmatize our feelings and reduce shame. I share this term with every client that comes into my therapy sessions and overwhelmingly and met with a “why didn’t they teach us this?”
Although the mood swings of a teenager can be difficult, they are not clinical. They do not necessarily equate to depression. Similarly, the stress we experience of transitioning into motherhood, as our bodies change, hormones fluctuate and we learn who we are as a parent, is not equivocably pathological.
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