During the pandemic, I spent months alone in a country house with two children under four, no nearby family, and a partner working an hour away. I didn’t know then that there was a word for what was happening to me psychologically and spiritually: matrescence.
We are told motherhood is the most natural thing in the world. Yet the actual experience of becoming a mother can feel entirely unnatural. Physically, we slowly expand until we can no longer see our feet or bend comfortably. Many expecting mothers experience heartburn, edema, nausea, and a host of pregnancy-related ailments, some more serious than others.
Emotionally, rapid hormonal shifts can trigger mood swings, heightened sensitivity, or anxiety that often intensifies after childbirth, especially for first-time mothers. Anxiety is a common but often unspoken part of the profound transition into motherhood—one of the many layered dimensions of matrescence, a term coined by anthropologist Dana Raphael in the 1970s that has reentered the cultural conversation in recent years thanks in part to Lucy Jones’s book Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood.
A Time of Mother-Becoming
Like adolescence, matrescence is a developmental transition marked by psychological, physiological, and spiritual change. It extends beyond hormonal fluctuations and the physical act of giving birth, encompassing the neurological rewiring that occurs as a woman’s relationship to herself, others, and the world fundamentally shifts.
It is a time of becoming—of moving from one version of oneself into another, never fully returning to who one was before. The experience can be many things at once: beautiful, fulfilling, exhausting, overwhelming, and even rage-inducing.
The Postpartum Struggle
Our culture has long centered the baby’s well-being while overlooking the mother’s postpartum experience. Beyond the intense pressures surrounding breastfeeding and infant care, many mothers are left to navigate sleep deprivation, hormonal upheaval, physical recovery, and the relentless standards of modern motherhood largely on their own.
This was my experience: isolated in a safe but lonely country home during the pandemic, caring for two small children without family support nearby. Looking back, I still struggle to comprehend how I endured that period alone. What strikes me now is how invisible that labor was—emotionally, psychologically, and physically. The experience of surviving it, and even growing through it, went largely unrecognized.
Anxiety as Adaptation
Most mothers experience some degree of anxiety after childbirth. For some, however, it becomes a chronic state of hyper-vigilance in which concern for a child’s well-being overshadows everything else. There is a wide spectrum, ranging from normal postpartum adjustment to clinical anxiety disorders.
Yet anxiety can also be adaptive. Postpartum women often experience heightened emotional sensitivity and threat perception, both deeply rooted in biology. Many mothers also experience cognitive and sensory overload from the constant demands and noise of caring for young children.
In Hark: How Women Listen, author Alice Vincent explores how women’s inner lives are shaped by sound and motherhood. Of societal expectations, she writes: “It is still easier for me to tune into the sounds of what society expects mothers to be, rather than that more vivid and vital song of what kind of mother I am.”
Spiritual Growth
Matrescence can feel like a spiritual initiation because motherhood reshapes identity so completely. Whatever existed before—career, ambition, independence—must coexist with a new and all-consuming reality.
In my case, I went from author and humanitarian worker to spending my days immersed in the repetitive, often invisible labor of caregiving. Yet there is something deeply transformative in that repetition itself. The daily practice of patience, surrender, and care becomes its own kind of spiritual discipline.
It is also a period of profound vulnerability. A woman’s capacity for love deepens alongside a simultaneous loss of self. As Lucy Jones writes, “I will always be in thrall to them, but they won't always be in thrall to me . . . This intimacy has a shelf life.”
The anxiety many women experience during this period, if not debilitating, does not have to be understood solely as dysfunction. It can also reflect heightened sensitivity—an embodied awareness of profound transformation. There is a way to live alongside it, softening its edges without needing to eliminate it entirely.
An Ayurvedic Perspective
In Ayurveda, postpartum anxiety is often understood as an expression of elevated Vata—the energy associated with movement, air, and nervous system activity. When Vata is high, the mind can feel scattered, overstimulated, and unsettled. The goal is not suppression, but grounding.
What ultimately helped me was not eliminating anxiety entirely, but learning how to steady myself within it. Ayurveda approaches this through simple, repetitive forms of care that signal safety to the body:
- Warm, nourishing foods and drinks, including turmeric milk or CCF tea (cumin, coriander, and fennel)
- Abhyanga massage using warm oil to calm the nervous system
- Intentional rest during the postpartum period
- Gentle breathing practices that lengthen the exhale
- Rituals such as tea-making, yoga, or quiet time away from screens and stimulation
None of these practices erase the deeper emotional complexity of matrescence, nor are they meant to. But they can help create enough steadiness for the transformation itself to be witnessed rather than merely endured.
A Woman’s Rebirth
At the time, I had no idea I was moving through matrescence. Now, with a four-year-old and a six-year-old, I feel in many ways reborn myself—as though I have passed through a powerful storm and emerged reshaped by it: stronger, more spacious, and more resilient.
I wish I had understood then what was happening to me psychologically and physiologically. I wish I had possessed more language—and more support—for what prolonged stress and isolation do to a nervous system in real time.
A mother’s nervous system is foundational. Everything flows from how regulated and supported she feels. Caring for oneself is not selfish; it is essential. Supporting a mother’s stability strengthens the very environment her children depend upon most.
The early years of motherhood demand extraordinary physical and emotional energy. Anxiety, in this context, is often part of the broader terrain of matrescence—an expected dimension of profound transformation rather than something separate from it.
For anyone currently moving through this stage, or loving someone who is, compassion matters. Matrescence is a threshold experience: at times disorienting, overwhelming, and painful, but also deeply formative. And though it may not feel like it in the moment, it is also a passage through which a new self is quietly, steadily being formed.
