In the huge rite of passage of becoming a mother the edges between mother and woman are often very much superimposed or on the contrary, very well marked, feeling like the borders of completely different universes. 

Many women who become mothers do feel like they start forgetting who they were, they find it hard to separate being a mother from who they are as humans and often their mother identity takes center stage and overshadows all other aspects of their inner self. 

I don’t know who I am outside of being a mother. I don’t really know what I like anymore. 

As normal and common as these feelings are, they are just as much kept quiet, unknown and rarely shared. Mothers feel like this isn’t something to share, as they many times don’t even acknowledge it to themselves. They don’t give themselves the time or space to allow these questions to pop up.

When you become a mother, you start developing a new mindset that is vital to developing and successfully integrating your new role as a mother. 

The mother mindset, as it was defined by Dr. Daniel Stern, starts its complex and slow growth during pregnancy and it keeps unfurling with every little mothering experience you have.

The mother mindset becomes your primary one, particularly in postpartum and although your other mindset is still present, it’s certainly somewhere behind the scenes. Your needs, your desires, your past experiences and learnings are contained in this other mindset. The woman you, before becoming a mother, is there. 

It takes time for these two mindsets to learn to co-exist and to stop pulling you in separate directions. 

And while it is normal and beneficial for these 2 mindsets to learn to share your mind and your being peacefully, with less conflict and more agreement, many women find it challenging to remember and to allow that other self to take the reins, to be seen, to be heard and cared for. 

It becomes challenging to separate yourself from your mother role, particularly when you’ve been a stay at home mother, you’ve been quite isolated from friends and other social gatherings, you’ve not been encouraged or supported to get in contact with yourself to spend time alone or to do something other than caring for your baby. 

I believe the separation and union of mother and woman lie beyond the birth of the mother mindset and its peaceful coexistence with your other mindset. 

I think the way we perceive womanhood as a social construct and how each of us perceives their womanhood as the personal experience of being a woman, impact the inclusion of the mother identity and how it blends into our womanhood or, on the contrary, how it separates from it, like water from oil.

When we grow up, as little girls, we internalize and adopt beliefs about what it means to be a woman and about what it means to be a mother. While being a woman might mean that you also become a mother at a certain point in your life, being a mother might come with the expectations of canceling out the woman inside you and just living guided by your mother role and identity.

Think here of women who’ve had the experience of being mothered by women who sacrificed themselves and disappeared as women, remaining only mothers. This observed and lived experience, this way of being mothered is deeply rooted and imprinted into the lives of those little girls, now women and mothers themselves. 

The perfect mother image created by society has preset expectations about what a mother should do, look like, live like, that are oblivious to the realities of being a mother and toxic to her wellbeing and her child’s. 

When that image tells you that in order to be a good mother you must sacrifice yourself, put you needs last, stop having hobbies, stop having spare time, be interested only in your child’s life and blames mothers for caring for themselves, for prioritizing their needs, for going to work and not being with their child, for everything that goes wrong, you forget who the woman is. You forget who you are outside of mother. You forget what you like, what brings you joy, what excites you, what you value. 

You don’t stop being a woman when you become a mother.

You don’t stop being a mother when you remember the woman inside you. I believe that honoring your womanhood and who you are outside of your role as mother and outside your mother identity is key to keeping these two parts of you in a symbiotic, authentic relationship. 

Your needs, your desires, your sexuality, your passions and your experiences as a woman ask for a place at the table.

By allowing them to take their deserved share,  you connect to yourself, the woman and allow that connection to co-exist and influence the way you mother. You start mothering authentically, from a place of rootedness and empowerment, that can only come when you let that amazing woman inside you bloom.

You bring your gifts as a woman into your mothering and you bring your gifts as a mother into your womanhood. And all these gifts are poured onto earth: your child, your family, your community, your city, your culture. 

Your mothering ripples beyond your personal universe. 

Your womanhood and your motherhood are both superpowers you can combine to bring out your best possible versions. Because it’s not going to be just one version, is it?

You're constantly growing, changing and shedding layers you’re no longer needing, to make room for new parts. You’re renegotiating your values and your priorities with every experience you have and having both the woman and the mother present and called for, ensures you make the most of everything you live.

So, if you the woman and you the mother sat down to talk, knee to knee and womb to womb, what would they say to each other? 

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to share in the comments or email me to talk about your experience.

✨

holding space for you, mama,

Simona

I hold Women Circles and Mother Circles. I love them. 

They fill me with a newfound and yet extremely old familiar feeling of power. Not the power that comes from domination, from fear or from a misguided sense of superiority. 

No, it’s the power that flows softly, yet determined, the power that births and holds together, the power that comes from connection, presence and intention, the power that comes from vulnerability. 

This is the sense of power you gain when you sit in circle with other women, knee to knee, womb to womb, heart to heart. The power of women gathered together. 

So why is it that whenever women gather together in a sacred, intentional space like a circle of women, they leave changed? What happens in the circle that alchemizes parts of themselves they thought lost, forgotten or lacking? 

The circle is and always has been in many cultures, myths, folklore and symbolism a representation of life, of continuity, of cyclicality and openness, of eternity and softness, of the origin of things and of connection. So, infusing a space and a gathering with these meanings, automatically gives it power, it gives it weight and meaning. 

As women, we ourselves represent many of these qualities and are a reflection of them through our very nature. 

Our wise inner cyclicality that we experience month to month, ending with our bleed is a reflection of nature itself, of life itself.

Each month we prepare to bring forth a life, we orchestrate our system, nurturing our womb to the peak of ovulation, of maximum bloom, for it to possibly be the home of a life. If that does not happen, then our bodies reflect the ebb and flow of nature, slowing down, hormones dropping, our uterine lining preparing to be shed, to be composted and transformed through menstruation, when we experience a death/rebirth experience, meant to prepare us for a new beginning, a new cycle. Month after month. We are amazing. 

As women who are mothers, you carry an even deeper power and reflect even more strongly the symbols of life, completion, connection, cyclicality, eternity. 

The circle provides women with a sanctuary to remember. 

To remember their nature, their feminine, perfect, amazing nature. 

To remember their wise cyclical nature, their enoughness, their wholeness, their amazing power to birth worlds, their fierce and forgotten power to create anything, their connection to themselves.

To remember what it feels like to be surrounded by women and feel safe. 

To remember what it feels like to be seen, held, acknowledged, honored.

To remember what it feels like to be free, to experience and feel, to sit relaxed and unapologetic, to be revered for your uniqueness. 

To remember what it feels like to allow yourself to break patterns that keep you small, contained, cut to fit expectations. 

To remember what it feels like to let go of voices who tell you this is taboo, you shouldn’t do this, you’re not allowed. 

To remember what it feels like to be witchy, witchy meaning wise, healer, intelligent, intuitive, connected to all nature and her elements, possessor of the biggest power of them all, the power to birth worlds. 

When women come together in circle they break free and they break loose. 

When women come together in circle they forget the faded, people pleaser, good girl conditioning and they tap into their authentic, grounded, embodied selves. 

The circle does not actually do anything but provide us with a space and time set aside intentionally to come back to ourselves. 

We do the rest. 

Looking back to the image of my last circle, with a beautiful center piece honouring mothers, matrescence, the power of life, cyclicality in ourselves and in nature, the rhythm of life and her wise phases, I know that when I hold a circle, I am just remembering. 

The women who did this before me. 

The women in my family, the women before them.

The mothers, the sisters and the daughters. 

The women who gathered in red tents. 

The women who gathered under the moon. 

The women who gathered, even though scared.

The women who gathered, even though punished.

The women who gathered because they knew if they didn’t, they would be lost.

Goosebumps. Chills. Remembering.

Savage Daughter Ekaterina Shelehova

I am my mother’s savage daughter 

The one who runs barefoot 

Curses sharp stones

I am my mother’s savage daughter 

I will not cut my hair

I will not lower my voice.

We are all brought forth out of darkness

Into this world, through blood and through pain

And deep in our bones, the old songs are waking

So sing them with voices of thunder and rain

We are our mother's savage daughters

The ones who run barefoot

Cursing sharp stones

We are our mother's savage daughters

We will not cut our hair

We will not lower our voice.

✨

holding space for you, mama,

Simona

Transitions that mark our passage from one version of us to the next are necessary for evolution, for growth and for the cycle of life to continue.

Part of life is always going through cycles of losing, finding, forgetting, remembering, tearing down and rebuilding our lives and parts of it. Sometimes they go by unnoticed, while other times they are more intense and deeply visible. 

These big transitions of life, the ones that take us from one version of us to the next, are meant to be held and honored so that they can fulfill their meaning: transforming us into our next self. 

They are rites of passage that mark the end of one phase of life and the beginning of a new one. They mark our separation of a role, an identity, a way of being and living, a stage of life and the transformation and integration of a new one. 

We are connected to this rhythm, whether we’re aware of it or not. With this awareness comes also the power and wisdom to wield our personal power, gained by aligning with this inner cycle, to embody it.

We also experience bigger and impactful rites of passage starting with our own birth and then continuing throughout our lives with other impacting ones such as menarche (first bleed), birth, matrescence, menopause. These rites often go by unacknowledged and we integrate whatever happens or does not happen during these times. 

Becoming a mother is a massive, complex, deep transition you’re experiencing with every fiber of your being and in every layer of your life.

Matrescence is a rite of passage that marks your transformation into mother. It is the unspoken, unsupported and unacknowledged rite of passage that happens, no matter what the culture says or sees. 

We do not speak about the becoming of the mother in our culture, we have forgotten to honor and pay care and attention to this essential transformation.

We have replaced what should be a deeply spiritual, emotional and supporting ritual with consumerism. We feel that if we get the right pram, the right clothes and baby wearer, we will be prepared. If we throw a baby shower and buy all the possible things for the coming baby, then it is all right, that means we will be good mothers. 

And this need to buy new things in order to feel prepared comes from a deep need to mark such an important transition, that you feel with every fiber of your being that it will change you forever. So, in the absence of a meaningful ritual that acknowledges you as a mother, you try to mark it through acquiring the physical elements that show this is truly happening. 

What you are living or aren’t living in this transition impacts how you enter and reside is this role of mother. It impacts how you see yourself, how you see your mothering and how you mother.

So, every bit of information you get, the support you receive or don’t receive, the advice and stories you hear, the preparation, they all inform you about the expectations this new role holds. What is expected from me as a mother? What does society expect me to do, be, act like? How will I be seen and what does it mean to be a mother? 

Whether you are aware of it or not, matrescence happens. And matrescence as a rite of passage if not there to mark your physical birth as a mother, though that is the most obvious - you carry your baby inside you and then they’re in your arms.

Matrescence as a rite of passage is there to support your emotional, social and psychological becoming as a mother. A process that takes time, exploration, being with and going through your own lived experience as a mother. 

When you become aware of your lived experience as a mama, shed light on it, gently and thoughtfully explore it, hold it with love and kindness, you open a portal to your own growth and healing.

Being witnessed and held while going through this deep transition is key to having a smooth passage.

This tells your whole being: this is happening, it is going to be hard and here’s what you can do, you got this, you are a mother now, you are honored and seen, you are strong and worthy.

Matrescence takes you from one stage of your life into the next, from maiden to mother, marking the end of an era and the beginning of another. It is this immense transformation that happens inside you while going through it that turns matrescence into a deep and powerful rite of passage. This rite of passage allows you to step into your new role, harness its power and integrate it, embodying a you beyond your imagination. 

I know exploring your matrescence may seem unfamiliar or even scary. I invite you to take this first step of acknowledging your matrescence and how it changed you, with me. In an Explore Your Matrescence Session I gently guide you to reflect on your personal journey to and through matrescence. I’d love to hold you in this process.

✨

holding space for you, mama,

Simona

What messages surrounded you? 

Which of those messages did you feel were said with support, with kindness, with care?

Many of the mothers I spoke with or worked with show a certain disappointment or even resentment when they reflect on that time, realizing that nobody actually told them the big, complex, messy parts of becoming a mother.

Mothers feel somehow cheated for not having had that wisdom, that circle of women, of elders or close community to pass on the real about motherhood.

Not just about how to care for your baby, not just the practicalities, but about what happens with the mother, how it changes her so deeply, how it can feel truly disorienting and overwhelming. 

The messages surrounding pregnant or future planning-to-be mothers are often merely scratching the surface of what motherhood brings and they portray either an ideal image about motherhood or a negative one, one that paints motherhood in a gloomy doomsday evil: you’ll see when you’re a mom. You think you’re not sleeping now, wait until you’re in it for months.

You’re hearing things like you’ll forget about the pain when you see your baby’s face, you’ll be happy and satisfied OR you hear the somehow vindictive “advice” of women who have found it hard themselves, had little to no support and are now venting through the false sense of relief given by knowing that someone else will also feel this hard, ha! 

This is a very toxic binary and one that shows only some aspects of motherhood that might pop up and that are transitory and that certainly don’t reflect the journey you’re about to embark on. 

Nobody goes deep to talk about the complex transformation that becoming and being a mother brings, nobody speaks about the inner happenings, about the rich inner life that unfolds inside you, with no voice to speak it or eyes to see it. And that is many times because mothers lack words to describe this immense transformation. 

They don’t know that what they’re experiencing is huge, that it’s experienced by all women all over the world and it has a name. They don’t have a framework and a context to support their experiences and a common language that makes it easier and safe to share their feelings, their challenges. 

The transformation a woman undergoes when she become a mother has a name: MATRESCENCE.

That is why, part of my mission as a certified Seasons of Matrescence® Guideis making MATRESCENCE known to you, as a real and palpable transformation, one that follows a pattern, one that carries wisdom and gifts. I want to support you to give words to your inner seasons of matrescence, to put what you’re going through on a map, one that guides all mothers, so that your experience makes sense to you, gives you power and knowledge about yourself. 

Knowing about matrescence as it unfolds, knowing about it before you become a mother allows you to put your experience into words, to give meaning to what you’re going through and to make the unconscious, conscious.

When you know that this huge transformation is meant to change you, to feel hard, that you’re meant to have support and offer yourself compassion and kindness along the way, when you know that all mothers go through this, you start feeling less alone. You find a sense of sisterhood that connects you with all the mother of the earth and you know that there is a rhythm in this seemingly random and chaotic journey. 

Matrescence will rock all your boats, it will throw out what you don’t need and make room for the new, it will stretch you and push you beyond where you’ve been before.

It will also be a process that takes time and asks you to constantly renegotiate your values, your priorities and your life.  

Matrescence will welcome you into this new realm of mothers, that is filled with fascinating insights, amazing discoveries and also challenging times, high expectations and shadows to face.

It will feel confusing and hard. It will also feel empowering. And it will ultimately feel unique to yourself. 

It will take all of you to go through it and it will teach you that all the cycles you’re going through have meaning, uncover gifts and that you’re asked to connect to yourself and to what truly matters to you in order to welcome a new you, to change and adapt, to grow and shift, to expand. 

Matrescence will open the doors to all the corners of your being, revealing what you need to let go of in order to grow and birth new versions of yourself.

If you want to start exploring your matrescence and don’t know where to start, I invite you to take these steps with me in a Explore Your Matrescence Session. We go gentle, you feel held and you allow your story to have a voice.

✨

holding space for you, mama,

Simona

Motherhood is messy, it’s chaotic and confusing and for many mothers it can feel like an uprooting from everything they knew to be true. It can contain a multitude of experiences and a whole bag of emotions, seemingly opposite or making no sense. 

Becoming a mother comes with paradoxes that turn your world upside down.

Joy and grief.

Pain and awe.

Confusion and a sense of purpose.

No wonder so many mothers wonder if there’s something wrong with them for feeling seemingly opposite things at the same time. You can find yourself feeling a need to be alone and to own your body again and at the same time feeling that you don’t want to leave your baby with someone else. 

You can feel and find a new sense of purpose and know this is your mission and find resources inside you that you never even knew you had. And at the same time you can feel deeply unsatisfied and confused by this new routine, these tasks that blend together in what looks like a repetitive pattern you’re stuck in.

You can feel immense joy and wonder at your baby’s first steps, her accomplishment and evolution and at the same time wanting to stop it all, so that her tiny little hands never stop holding onto you for comfort. 

You can feel like you’re expanding in so many directions and that you’re rearranged and seeing so far in space and time, with such a wide new perspective and still feel that you’re trapped and constricted by the routines and lack of control over your life, over your schedule and your body. 

And so many more.

An infinity of worlds lived in the inner life of a mother. Deeply complex, holding both sides of life at the same time. Ad infinitum. 

So you wonder? Am I losing it? Which one is real? The feeling that I need time for myself or the feeling that I never want to be without my baby? Which should I trust?

The inner life of a mother is deeply complex and multi faceted.

Both can be true inside you at the same time. They can co-exist in your inner world and there is nothing wrong with you. If anything, you are capable of deeply feeling your transformation as a mother, you are aware and alive.

In an emotionally illiterate culture, where we push down and run away from our emotions, feeling so deeply and being present in your transformation can become overwhelming and it is in fact challenging the status quo. 

So when you feel all your experience and allow it to move through you, you also start understanding that you’re so immensely complex that you can carry many shades of life inside you. 

Maternal ambivalence - feeling two seemingly opposing feelings at the same time- is normal and is a common reality of the life of mamas. Feeling joy and anger, feeling awe and frustration, love and sadness. 

There’s the mother you, who feels deeply and is pushed to care for her baby and wanting to be with her at all times and at the same time there’s the you who is not a mother, who remembers your past life, who feels your needs, your wants and pulls you away from being with your child at all times. And that is normal. They’re both part of you and they both live inside you. But particularly in the first months, years postpartum they are often in conflict and pull you in separate directions. 

It can feel very consuming and hard to reconcile two emotions that seem to ask different things from you. As you’re pushed and pulled in two opposite directions it can feel overwhelming. 

Having support and a gentle acknowledgement of your reality can shift the way these emotions run through you. It can help you find a sense of validation and a compass to navigate these intense emotions.

Do you feel pulled between 2 seemingly opposing emotions inside you? I would love to hear about your experience if you want to share this with me and if you want to be held in 1:1 support by me. 

This is also a topic we explore in THE SUPPORTED MOM PROGRAM, if you’re craving group support and a tight group of sister to share with. 

Whatever your season is as a mother and a woman, know that you’re not alone and that you deserve all the support in the world.

✨

holding space for you, mama,

Simona

Matrescence is essentially all of your lived experience since becoming a mother. It’s all the shifts, changes and challenges you’ve been going through since finding out you’re pregnant. 

Knowing that matrescence exists and not only that it exists, but how impactful it is, can improve your wellbeing as a mother, the dynamics of your relationships and it can help you get closer to parenting authentically, in a way that aligns with your values. 

Now, if you’re new to matrescence, I recommend reading my article Matrescence 101.

Matrescence is a studied (granted, not enough, but getting there) developmental process that any mother goes through and it’s one that affects all areas of her life. It takes her from being a woman to being a woman and a mother.  

As any process that involves the development of an individual, it starts physically and then goes deeper and wider into all layers that constitute your being. So, you’re experiencing a rearranging of areas of your life: physical, psychological, social, cultural, spiritual, career. 

The changes you experience as a mother aren’t arranged in a chronological order and don’t respect a strict and one-size-fits-all pattern and most importantly are felt differently by all mothers. 

Even though the experience of becoming and being a mother is universal, it is at the same time a very unique personal process. 

So, if a mother might feel deeply challenged by the changes in her body and she might struggle with adjusting to the new way she looks and to her perceived body image, another mom might have a new sense of appreciation for her body and experience a total awe thinking about how amazing her body is for having carried and birthed a baby. 

A mother might find adjusting to the new rhythms of life, the routines, the lack of previous social life really triggering and hard to take, while another mother might struggle to reconnect to her partner and to recover their intimacy.

Knowing that all these changes are normal and can show up in matrescence, giving them a name and observing them in a framework that allows you to put your experience into words, helps you give meaning to them. 

Knowing of matrescence and of its ebbs and flows and knowing it’s a process that takes time & experienced by all mothers, helps you feel less alone and magically connected to mothers all over the world. 

Finding meaning in what we live is what connects us to our lived life, to ourselves and gives us the tools and drive to live it to the full. 

While you’re going through such an intense transition, where all parts of you are left exposed, you’re also learning to care for a new human being and that is in itself the highest test for anybody’s endurance, resilience, patience, commitment, you name it.

You need support, you need others to know about what you’re going through. You need your partner to become aware of the massive shift you’re in and in which, in a certain degree, they’re also in. 

Bringing matrescence into your relationships, by actually discussing it and putting it on the table, can change the way your family, partner, your close ones perceive and understand you.

This can lead to more empathy, more genuine support and compassion from their part and from yours also. Yes, the same we show a teenager who goes through the ordeal of adolescence, another massive developmental process that has become well known and supported in society nowadays. 

A major part of matrescence is the birth of a new you. 

Yes, I bet nobody told you when you had your routine check ups in pregnancy or when you walked the maternity doors: Hey, you’re about to birth not just a baby, but also a new you. That takes time and you’re allowed to find it hard. You need all the support you can get.

That would’ve been amazing and if you’ve had it, I’m so happy for you!

The birth of a new you is in itself such an amazing, challenging, scary, empowering process and it shakes you up, it holds a mirror at you and asks you to answer some complex questions: Who am I? What am I doing here? Where am I headed? What is important to me? 

Acknowledging this process of growing a new you is huge. It allows you to hold yourself with compassion, to quiet that inner critic and to tone down the guilt that haunts parents and keeps them up at night. 

By connecting to yourself and allowing yourself to go through matrescence at your own pace, you’re also able to be present for your child in a true, authentic way. It allows you to shake off shoulds and patterns that keep you tied up in shame and guilt.

If you’re constantly looking for advice elsewhere, feeling like you’re not enough, if you’re constantly feeling guilty or ashamed of how you perceive motherhood and how your mother, beating yourself up for not doing it all, for resting, if you’re always comparing yourself to other mothers and come out lacking, these might be signs that you’re not fully aware of what you’re going through and how it impacts you, that you’re not supported enough. 

Living in a social construct of motherhood- that makes you measure yourself up to an ideal and false image of what a mother should be- only takes you further away from yourself and from your values. And guess what, that impacts how you parent. You start parenting from fear, from guilt and a not enoughness that leaves you numb. 

Being supported and held with care and compassion in the biggest transition of your life impacts how you can show up for your child.

No, it does not mean you’ll be perfect, that you’ll tick all the boxes of the perfect parent (who isn’t real by the way), it means you’ll be aware of how you want to parent, true to what feels right for you and dedicated to making that happen, as best as you can. 

Matrescence is big, it changes you and it offers an opportunity to look at yourself, hold yourself with compassion and flow with its rhythms, adjusting, rearranging, growing and letting go. 

✨

holding space for you mama,

Simona

Well, dear and lovely mama reading, MATRESCENCE is all of your lived experience since becoming a mama. 

I know that we can pinpoint and we generally do pinpoint becoming a mama to that first cry of your baby that you hear after you’ve given birth, but you know and it’s a reality that you become a mother starting with the moment you learned about your pregnancy. 

From the moment you learn about your baby forming inside you, you start becoming a mother and everything you live in and outside of yourself is matrescence. Physiologically, yes, you become a mother when your baby is born. But to become a mother there is a whole process that you go through, that rebuilds your every layer and re-arranges your life. 

Matrescence is a developmental process. 

Think about adolescence as an anchor to help you better understand how matrescence unfolds. Think of all the aspects in a child that transform in order to turn them into that young adult. It is not just physical right? Yes, the physical ones do make themselves seen, the acne, the smells, the change in appearance. But, there are also emotional changes, psychological changes, identity shifts that happen within than child. The way they see themselves and the way others see them change fundamentally. 

Similarly to adolescence, the changes that transform you into a mother impact all areas of your life. Unsimilarly to adolescence, matrescence is not supported, nor acknowledged. It goes by unnoticed, kept quiet, taken for granted.

When you become a mother, it’s not just your body that’s changing and shifting, looking and feeling differently, but you also experience these changes in many other areas too. In all areas of your life. Psychologically, you deal with the very real and very stark challenge of literally developing a new identity.

YOU STOP BEING THE SAME YOU. You stop doing the same things, living the same way, valuing the same things. 

Socially and culturally, you take on a new and foreign role, the role of mother. You enter a different social group and that comes with a whole new set of rules and expectations.

Spiritually, the way you look at life and its meaning, the way you look at yourself and your meaning change. You develop new values, you feel part of or dedicated to something bigger that you.

Possible changes you might experience include a shift in your relationships or an ending altogether to prior relationships, a shift in the way you see yourself and others, developing new values and rearranging priorities, shifting careers, finding a new appreciation for your body or the opposite, struggling to adapt to your new body. 

Your personal history up to the point you become a mother, your specific context, everything that happens or does not happen when you become a mother and while you adjust to being one, impact how you experience matrescence.

No experience of a mother is the same as another’s.

At the same time, the immense transformation and impact matrescence has are universal. All mothers go through matrescence and they all need support. 

You’re not broken my amazing and dear mama if you didn’t find it blissfull and you’re not broken if you struggle with it and have postnatal depression.

You’re not broken because you're in the throes of matrescence and you find it challenging. It is real, it is normal for it to happen and it is normal to find it hard, to find that you need support, that you need space to think about and talk about your experience as a mother.

Your experience and your story are important! With everything. With the  overflowing love, with the anger, with looking in the mirror and not recognizing yourself, with the overwhelming mental load, the need for time alone, the sense of purpose and the sense of loss of your previous life. It is all welcomed, it is all worthy, it is yours and I see it and I honor it. 

Matrescence is a natural, incredible transformation that requires a deconstruction and a reconstruction of yourself, your life, your identity and your values.

Matrescence centers you, mama. It sees you, talks about you and puts you in the center, not backstage. When we hear about a baby coming into the world, all the focus, all the worry is on the child, on how they will grow, how they will receive what they need. And of course it is important. But nobody looks at the mother, nobody sees the mother as going through her own massive changes, her own challenges, nobody seems to take into account that you, mama, need support too.

Your story is important, your story is essential!

Your transformation deserves to be honoured. It carries with it all your strenghts and gifts, it writes your story. The way you face these challenges, the way you’re supported in this transition and in this new stage of your life, they all impact your mothering. The ripples it creates in the world around you are massive, transcending space and time.

It is not on you to fix a society that needs to learn how to support mothers and honour their transformation. It is on you and for you to explore your fascinating inner world and to make sense of your experience. To carry your mothering proudly into the world.

Matrescence can be a source of immense growth, of expansion. It brings with it a new start and a new you, which is scary and also filled with so many possibilities.

Matrescence can also be a source of belittling, of making you feel like you’re not enough, because though you are incredibly powerful as you go through this, you’re also vulnerable and open to the messages around you, to the support you receive or don't receive during this massive transition.

If you’re asking: how long does it last? I will tell you this:

Matrescence and your constant transformation as a mother is, I believe, a life-long process.

Because with every change, you’re asked to re-evaluate your mothering, your role as a mother, your values and your priorities. You keep shedding and growing new layers, you deconstruct and put back together, you close stages and start anew.

Your child starts walking. Your child starts school. You have another child. You start work. You change homes, cities. You lose loved ones. A new you. Always a new you, that keeps building on top or around the others who served her well. You keep becoming.

✨

holding space for you, mama,

Simona