Ways of Mothering
On my daughter's first year, seasons of matrescence, and the transformation(s) of motherhood
My daughter turned one this week, so I've been thinking a lot lately about the last year of motherhood. She is my second child, so in many ways I knew what to expect, and I also knew that for every iteration, motherhood is an intense and unpredictable transformation. For example, I wasn't surprised by the intensity of the postpartum weeks and months, but I was surprised when I got mastitis three times, especially considering that I had never had it in 2+ years of breastfeeding my son. Like so many transformational experiences, we can usually only articulate the narrative in retrospect, which is what I have been trying to do lately, knowing that how we tell the story shapes our relationship to it.
I have been pregnant three times since 2020 with those three pregnancies spanning every year, meaning I have been pregnant at some point in the year for five consecutive years. These last five years have been one long season of matrescence, a concept and word first introduced by anthropologist Dana Raphael and since taken up across a variety of disciplines to describe the holistic transformation of motherhood that spans pre-conception to birth, adoption, or surrogacy and beyond.1 The term matrescence is meant to capture the profound ways in which becoming a mother touches every aspect of our mind, body, emotion, and spirit, just like adolescence. It goes beyond identity, although it encompasses it, to include the way that our bodies change materially after birthing—or if we do not become mothers through biological birth, through the act of caregiving. I knew, walking into this new season of motherhood, that I would be a different person on the other side of having my daughter, even if I didn't know exactly what that would look like. I knew that because I was a different person after having my son in 2020, and then again after my miscarriage in 2022.
Matrescence is slowly trickling into the mainstream discourse, but I have found it such a liberating concept because it has given me permission to let myself collapse and reconfigure in a way that I think is often not modeled in American society. Instead of a narrative of transformation, the narratives I observe around motherhood tend to take a couple of broad forms. The first is the "bounce back" model, which is a public-facing commitment to living as if pregnancy and birth never happened, whether that's physically "losing the baby weight" or returning to one's career, social life, or relationships with children carefully excised from the frame—clinging to one's old identity, in some form. The second is what I'll call the subsumption model, in which the maternal identity collapses into her child or children, her former dreams, desires, and aspirations sacrificed on the altar of her children. The metaphor here is of visibility, in that motherhood is nearly invisible (at least publicly) in the first model and the mother as subject is nearly invisible in the second model, eclipsed by her role as mother. I see the problem as two sides of the same coin: the first as an inability to release the old identity and the second as an inability to form a new identity beyond the maternal. It is also a tension between public and private, the domain of capital or production and the domain of home and family. These categories are oversimplified for clarity's sake, of course, and there are lots of practical reasons why mothers cannot or choose not to pursue dreams once they are living the reality of care work in America or why they might want to separate motherhood and public life.
The problem I am framing here is also the question of maternal subjectivity, or the mother as subject, as self, independent from (and yet inextricably intertwined with) the existence of her child. Can a mother be an autonomous subject, or is she fundamentally an object backgrounded to her child? Feminists, psychologists, philosophers, and many others have approached this question from a number of directions for decades now2, but the consequences are clear in the ways that motherhood is litigated, regulated, and discussed in popular discourse, the but she's a mother sort of moral outrage perpetrated against women who draw outside the bounds of what is deemed appropriate maternal behavior. For my purposes here, I am less interested in structural issues and more interested in how individuals navigate maternal identity and particularly the crucible of matrescence. For example, I hope to expand the discussion beyond the old "mommy wars" discussion of working mom vs. stay-at-home mom by suggesting that the transformation has less to do with career and more with holistic identity and self-image—the mother's own perception of subjectivity, and how she navigates that within the structures available to her. I also hope to account for the ways we are predisposed to find safety where we can, usually by clinging to something familiar, whether that is an aspect of who we understood ourselves to be or a pattern we saw performed in our own lives, perhaps by our mothers or women in our immediate environment, rather than placing blame on individuals. For me, the issue of these oppositional narratives, subjectivity vs. maternity, is that it limits the possibilities for what mothers are able to imagine for their lives, but a narrative of transformation opens up possibility.
When I had my son in 2020, I was still in the throes of grief after losing my father to brain cancer seven months earlier while also navigating the collective crisis of the pandemic. I was a writer who had recently completed graduate school but I didn't have a clear career path other than a compulsion to write the book (which was going slower than I hoped) and my part-time work disappeared shortly before or during the pandemic. As a stay-at-home mom who had never really expected to be a stay-at-home mom, I took that circumstance as a mandate for performing an idealized, aspirational version of motherhood. For me, this involved a lot of research: the ideal sleep techniques, feeding methods, brain-developing play, diapering. I spent hours constructing my registry, convinced that if I had the right, best, low-tox gear, I could provide the optimal future for my son. I clearly remember a moment while agonizing over whether to use cloth or disposable diapers, thinking to myself, if I can just figure this choice out, everything else will be easy.
This is laughable now, of course, knowing everything about motherhood is a branching tree of decisions that becomes infinitely more complex and often higher stakes the older your child gets. The choices I spent hours deliberating at the beginning seem so quaint now considering how seriously I took them at the time. But the responsibility for my son felt so profound, particularly considering the unique circumstances in which he had entered my life and the fear of loss that was, in the wake of my father's death and the unknowns of the pandemic, quite concrete. I believed that if I could perform motherhood perfectly, with the best information, the best data, the expert opinions, then I could keep us both safe. What this performance looked like changed a lot between the research I did while I was pregnant and the lived experience of caring for my son, which is another discussion, but I functioned off the belief that if I followed the expert opinions on the right or best way to mother, I could pass the test—something I had always been very good at, after all.
What this looked like, in practice, was what the sociologist Sharon Hays calls "intensive mothering," which is the idea that modern mothers are expected to "expend a tremendous amount of time, energy, and money in raising their children.”3 The cultural ideal of intensive mothering expects mothers to develop expert-level knowledge regarding all aspects of their child's care, devoting their resources and full attention to their education and development—frequently, on top of professional responsibilities, and within the context of the nuclear family which means very little external support even if you have a supportive partner. Often this takes the form of endless books and parenting classes, quite a few of which I have purchased in my own time as mother. For me, there is a tension here: I found many of those resources very helpful, giving me the feeling of security I needed to feel confident in the parenting choices I was making—but I recognize, too, the way that capitalism and economics have shaped my parenting choices in ways that were not always apparent to me at the time. I also acknowledge, in retrospect, the way that deferring to expert authority overrode attunement to my baby and my own intuition.
Working mothers are expected to practice intensive mothering as well, but since mothering was my job at the time, I embraced what might be considered an extreme version of this, taking mothering as my course of study. I read the books and took courses on sleep, breastfeeding, solid foods, behavior, followed educational parenting accounts on Instagram. I swaddled my son and dutifully put him to sleep on his bath in a dark room with a white noise machine, following a schedule that an app on my phone told me was optimal for his age and his last sleep window. While he slept, I carved out little windows of time for myself, sleeping, showering, eating; later, reading or writing in little bursts. If he woke up earlier than I expected, I felt a flash of annoyance. When he was awake, I tried to play brain-enriching games with him with black and white cards and expensive Montessori-inspired toys, or when he got older set up elaborate sensory trays, but for all the ways I loved spending time with my son and found him an endless miracle, those activities felt draining, numbing. I found myself subsumed in motherhood, the boundaries of my self difficult to distinguish.
To some extent, this subsumption is necessary and normal: there is a physiological logic to it, the interdependence of mother and baby what is referred to as the mother-baby dyad. It is what keeps us alive as a species, what forms our nascent nervous systems, what shapes our cognition and emotions and sets our neurobiological template for a lifetime (which can be rewritten via neuroplasticity, but the importance is difficult to overstate). Particularly during that early postpartum period, the woman who existed prior to motherhood is necessarily subsumed—she no longer exists independent of her child, whose care and feeding often depends quite literally on the maternal body. I perceived this correctly, early in motherhood, and especially throughout that first year. For me, a huge lesson of that first year was that all the ways society expected me to routinely separate from my child—whether through common sleep or feeding or parenting techniques, many of them claiming to be research-based, many of them claiming to benefit me or my child in some long-lasting momentous way—did not feel right to me intuitively, by which I mean a deep, felt sense, like the negative poles of a magnet repelling me. It took me a long time to gain confidence in that intuition and even longer to understand how to take action based on it, but for me a sharpening of my intuition has been one of the greatest—though hard-fought—gifts of matrescence.4
Everyone's "curriculum" in motherhood is a bit different, and what I believe each of us are asked to examine about ourselves—our lives, our identities, our belief systems, our values—looks a bit different through each iteration of matrescence. So often, the medicine of motherhood is a balance between a release of control and making aligned choices in our and our family's best interest. Dogma and certainty, in any direction, can help us feel safe but they also become our ideological prisons. My lived experience of matrescence is unique to me but I also think it illustrates larger concepts and patterns that I have observed (I seem to learn through binaries and extremes, for better or for worse), and I hope that this can illuminate a thought, assumption, or experience for someone else. What a narrative of transformation might have given me after the birth of my son is the permission to let the parts of me that wanted to grip to certainty, knowledge, expert opinion, authority, security, or control the opportunity to collapse. It would have given me the permission to witness how destabilizing that felt, how disorienting, and then reimagine a new way forward, a new model of motherhood than the ones I had witnessed so far. I got there eventually, but it probably would have been a little less painful if someone had gently told me, early on, to trust that quiet little glimmer of knowing that felt a physical ache when my child cried alone in another room. It would have helped if someone had asked me, what assumptions, beliefs, worldviews, or identities are you being asked to examine or release? Where could you allow yourself to fall apart a bit?
My second pregnancy, which ended in a life-threatening miscarriage, prompted an entirely different kind of matrescence, one I truly did not have any models for—since after all, there was no child to mother, no societal recognition of the transformation I was undergoing, and because the facts of my miscarriage felt politically fraught in a way could not yet articulate. Again, I will explore this in more depth elsewhere, but in the wake of that miscarriage I changed almost every external facet of my life on an extreme pendulum swing, going from full-time stay-at-home mom to full-time university instructor and part-time Ph.D. student. I strove for more of a balance—something between "bouncing back" and being subsumed by motherhood, which for me requires space for deep intellectual and creative engagement. I realized that the ways I had tried to employ my intellect in mothering were not wrong, exactly, but I had been missing the larger frameworks to analyze what was in front of me, to identify and then critique the assumptions I and so many other mothers find ourselves confined by unwittingly. And yet, I also knew that my son was older, no longer quite as dependent on me as during those first months of life. If I were to have another child, that first year of motherhood—as I wanted to do it—required my physical presence intensively. Was it possible to have another baby and also mother that baby in the way I wanted while maintaining the professional, intellectual, and creative life I had fought so hard to reclaim?
During the summer of 2023, I took an unexpected solo vacation to Spain. It was supposed to be a family vacation, two weeks in Barcelona and Costa Brava with my husband, son, and a small group of friends including two of my college friends. But this was the first big travel summer since Covid, and my son's passport did not arrive on time. The housing and flights were all paid for, so I went alone. It was my first time being away from my son for longer than a night, and I had weaned him less than a year earlier. I was heartbroken to lose the once-in-a-lifetime family vacation we had been planning, but I also understood the gift I had been given and promised my husband I wouldn't take it for granted. I spent two weeks wandering through museums and Gaudi's architecture, eating leisurely meals of tapas at nine PM, drinking vermouth in plazas, and having long, uninterrupted conversations. I slept all night, alone, just as I had fantasized for years. I was not beholden to naptimes or a toddler's food restrictions or stroller accessible routes. The sensation was strange, like that of constantly misplacing something, the ghost-timeline of the family vacation we could have had, but it was also a critical reminder of who I was outside of motherhood.
The previous year had been one of intensive healing and self-reclamation following my life-threatening miscarriage. When I decided, finally, that I did want to try for a third pregnancy, I prepared by undergoing months of physical therapy, trauma therapy, acupuncture, energy healing, and more. If mothering was intensive, so too was preparing for the possibility of being a motherhood again—the whole spectrum of matrescence, beginning during preconception. Returning to work and then school and putting my son in full-time childcare had been both challenging and freeing, giving me the intellectual stimulation I craved and opening up new portals for curiosity and exploration, while also draining me—I felt both more alive and exhausted, like I had reignited my spark while never quite giving enough to anyone. My son seemed to be thriving, but I was acutely aware of the time I had sacrificed with him, the ways in which he took one small step away from me after another, needing me less and less.
One day, while we hiked along the Catalonian coast down to a secluded rocky beach, I thought to myself, what if there is a third way to do motherhood? A way to have the creative, intellectual, and professional life I desire as well as mother the way that feels resonant and intuitive to me? I knew that perfection in the way I had tried to perform it in the past was not attainable—there was no way to be the perfect mother while having the perfect career, at least by any sort of external measurement. But for me, motherhood had unlocked professional, creative, and intellectual interests I didn't even know I had. Motherhood was not separate from my creative or intellectual work, nor did I want it to be—in fact, many of the choices I had made only increased that enmeshment, as motherhood became my subject in writing and academia. I wanted to forge my own version of motherhood, one that reached beyond the seeming binaries of #bossbabe or #tradwife or any model I had yet seen, one in which I maintained a creative and intellectual self while also mothering the way I wanted, particularly in my daughter's infancy. I had a few expanders for this vision, but for the most part I felt like I was creating something I had not seen before.
I got pregnant again shortly after that trip, and birthed my daughter over the summer break, meaning that when the school year began, she had just turned three months old. I taught online asynchronously full-time and went to school part-time which involved driving in to campus one night a week. I did not have any childcare for my daughter, which at first was an experiment: how far into that first year of life could I get, I wondered, while staying home with her? However, I quickly created systems that worked for us, rhythms that changed with each developmental stage. I found the most effective way for me to get work done was with her asleep in the baby carrier or on my lap in our glider chair, which is the way I graded projects, wrote papers, read articles, responded to students, joined videoconferences, and wrote this Substack. For the past year, she has been on nearly every Zoom call, every meeting, attended conferences. My husband is a very involved father and my mom flew to meet me at a conference so I could attend, but for the most part, she has been next to me or physically attached to me for the last year. I have learned to be ruthlessly efficient with my time, to streamline tasks where I can, to prioritize based on what is easiest for me to complete during different times of our rhythm together.
There are compromises, too, and I won’t pretend this is a perfect model. As my daughter has become more alert, the undivided attention I always felt obliged to give my son looks a bit different and she often plays next to me while I work on my computer, a rhythm that works for her temperament. I do my best to stay attuned to her and build in little moments of uninterrupted presence throughout the day, and she lets me know, emphatically, when she has had enough of any particular arrangement. But it turns out, she is quite capable of playing with the ball run on her own, or sorting through toys and collecting them in little piles. I think a better model probably has to do with multigenerational support and community care, but this is the best I can do to meet both of our needs as fully as I can within our current material limitations. Recently, I joked she will be a co-author on my dissertation, but it is true that there is a reciprocity to our relationship: everything I have done in the last year has been informed by her, by our relationship. My children have shaped the work I do just as the work I do shapes the time and attention I can give to them.
A year in to my daughter's life, I am deeply proud of the things I have accomplished this year but also the way I achieved them, meaning the ways I have allowed my motherhood and the material reality of care work—breastfeeding, diaper changes, contact naps—to fuse with my public and professional life, creating this third way of mothering. This has been quite intentional, although not without conflict and not without privilege, as I am quick to recognize. I mentioned my experience recently at a conference as a liberatory example—mediated, as I know, by technology, and an understanding department and faculty, and my own persistence or some might say stubbornness—and it was pointed out to me that what I took as liberatory might be appropriated by the systems-that-be as an example of what all mothers should do, and therefore a continued excuse to deny universal parental leave and other structural solutions that would create more equitable societies. I took the point, but maintain that for me—from my subject position—mothering my daughter in this way has allowed me to reimagine and reinvent what motherhood looks like for me, a motherhood where I am fully realized as my intellectual and creative self while present for my daughter. The transformation for me, this time, has been in how motherhood and the act of mothering is woven through all aspects of my life with a little more fluidity and ease.
I would love to hear your stories of matrescence in the comments!
If you’d like to explore some of the ideas of this essay in your own life and work, here are a few writing prompts:
I believed I needed to be a stay-at-home mom to mother the way I wanted for the first year of my child’s life, but over time, reimagined a new way of mothering. What narratives, models, or assumptions have you (maybe unconsciously) been working off of in motherhood (or another experience)? What might some alternatives be?
How has motherhood transformed you? Where are you currently experiencing tension, friction, or resistance in your experience of motherhood? Spend some time writing about those friction points by inviting them to tell you what they might be asking you to notice, witness, or examine more closely.
For more reading about matrescence, check out Aurelie Athan’s work and Lucy Jones’ book Matrescence.
Stone, Alison. Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity. 1st ed., Routledge, 2012, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203182932;
Athan, Aurélie. “Matrescence as a Theoretical Space for Renewal: Discussion of the Special Issue on Maternal Subjectivity.” Psychoanalytic Perspectives, vol. 21, no. 3, 2024, pp. 441–47, https://doi.org/10.1080/1551806X.2024.2377931.
Hays, Sharon. The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.
Maternal intuition is a topic in its own right, and one I will probably dig into deeper later.