Matrescence: You Are Not Behind. You Are Not Broken. You Are Becoming.
There's a particular kind of disorientation that comes in the postpartum period that nobody really warns you about. Not the sleep deprivation — everyone mentions that. Not the physical recovery — you at least know that's coming. I mean the deeper thing. The moment you look in the mirror and don't quite recognize who's looking back. The way your sense of self feels rearranged. The grief that sneaks in alongside the love, even when you wanted this more than anything.
If that's happened to you, I want to give you a word for it: matrescence.
I sat down with Emily Sferra — acupuncturist, herbalist, and founder of Perennial Health Acupuncture — to talk about what matrescence actually is, why it blindsides even the most prepared parents, and what it looks like to be genuinely resourced through one of the biggest transitions of your life. Emily practices acupuncture and Chinese medicine with a dedicated focus on the mental-emotional aspects of wellbeing, and she brings a depth of thinking to perinatal care that I find rare and genuinely refreshing.
We also bonded immediately upon meeting because we're both named Emily S. Which felt like a sign.
What matrescence is — and why naming it matters
Matrescence is the process of becoming a mother. Physically, psychologically, socially, spiritually — all of it, at once, often simultaneously.
The term was coined by anthropologist Dana Raphael in the 1970s and has been slowly making its way into broader conversation. It draws a parallel to adolescence: another period of profound, identity-level transformation that's uncomfortable, disorienting, and completely normal. We don't tell teenagers they're failing at growing up. We recognize that becoming takes time.
We don't do that for new mothers. Instead, we hand them a six-week clearance and send them back into the world, often with the implicit expectation that they should be resuming their previous life — just now with a baby in it.
But you are not the same person you were before. You were never going to be. And the disorientation you're feeling isn't pathology. It's the growing pains of becoming someone new.
Naming it matters because unnamed experiences are harder to metabolize. When you don't have language for what's happening, it's easy to conclude that something is wrong with you. When you do have language, you can start to get curious instead.
Why even prepared parents feel blindsided
Here's something Emily Sferra said that I keep thinking about: preparation doesn't protect you from transformation.
You can read every book, take every class, build the village, stock the freezer, and still arrive in the postpartum period feeling like the ground has shifted beneath you. Because what you were preparing for was the baby. The feeding, the sleeping, the care. What nobody fully prepared you for was the dissolution and rebuilding of your identity.
The love is bigger than you expected. The loss is too. Your relationships change. Your sense of self changes. Your values reorganize in ways you didn't anticipate. Your body is different. Your capacity is different. And all of this is happening while you're running on no sleep and keeping another human alive.
Feeling blindsided isn't a failure of preparation. It's an honest response to how significant this actually is.
What Chinese medicine has known for thousands of years
One of the things I love about this conversation with Emily Sferra is the perspective that Chinese medicine brings — because it has been honoring the postpartum body in ways that Western medicine largely hasn't.
The sacred 40-day window is not a new concept. Across cultures and throughout history, the period immediately following birth has been recognized as one of profound vulnerability and need. A time for rest, for warmth, for nourishment, for being cared for — before the new mother is expected to do any caring of her own.
In Chinese medicine, birth involves a significant loss of qi and blood. That depletion is real and it takes time to restore. When we don't honor it — when we instead push through, bounce back, return to productivity — we're drawing from reserves we don't have. The cost of that shows up later, often in ways that are hard to trace back to their origin.
What this means practically is that how you are supported in the first weeks postpartum matters in ways that extend far beyond those weeks. The 40-day window isn't a nice-to-have. It's an investment in your long-term health.
The bounce-back culture problem
We have to name this directly: the cultural pressure to return to your pre-pregnancy body, your pre-pregnancy productivity, your pre-pregnancy self as quickly as possible is actively harmful.
It's harmful physically because your body needs time to restore what birth required of it. It's harmful psychologically because it communicates that the self you were before is the self worth being — and the one you're becoming is something to get past.
Matrescence asks for the opposite orientation. Instead of when will I get back to normal, what if the question were who am I becoming, and what does she need?
That's a fundamentally different relationship to the postpartum period. And it changes what you ask for, what you accept, and how you talk to yourself when things are hard.
Being resourced — what it actually looks like
Emily Sferra uses the word "resourced" in a way that I find really useful. Not just supported, not just surviving — resourced. Meaning you have what you need to draw from.
For a new parent, that might look like:
Actual rest, not just sleep when the baby sleeps while also answering emails and doing laundry. Rest that is protected and prioritized.
Nourishment that is warm, dense, and easy to digest — because a depleted body needs more than a handful of crackers grabbed between feeds.
Touch that is caring and non-demanding. Your body has been through something enormous and it deserves to be cared for, not just recovered from.
People around you who can hold things so you don't have to. Not advice-givers. Holders.
Space to feel what you're feeling without needing to explain or justify it.
And healthcare that sees all of you — not just your uterus, not just your latch, not just your mood score on a screening tool, but the whole person going through the whole transition.
That last one is why I do this work. And it's why I was so glad to meet Emily Sferra.
Trusting yourself again
One of the quieter losses of the postpartum period is trust in your own intuition. There is so much information, so many opinions, so many people — often well-meaning — telling you what your baby needs, what you should do, what normal looks like. And somewhere in the noise, your own inner knowing can get very hard to hear.
Emily Sferra talks about this as part of the work she does with postpartum clients — helping them come back to themselves. To their own body's signals, their own instincts, their own sense of what their baby and their family actually needs.
That's not something you have to earn back. It was there all along. Sometimes it just needs some quiet, and some support, to come forward again.
You are in a process
If you are in the thick of postpartum right now — overwhelmed, disoriented, grieving things you can't even name, loving your baby ferociously and still feeling like you've lost something — I want you to hear this:
You are not behind. You are not broken. You are in a process that humans have been moving through for as long as there have been mothers. It is hard because it is real and significant, not because you are doing it wrong.
Give yourself the 40 days. Give yourself the year. Give yourself permission to become slowly, messily, imperfectly — because that's the only way it actually happens.
Love,
Emily
Listen to the full conversation with Emily Sferra on The Be Well Baby Podcast.
You can find her at perennialhealthacupuncture.com.
And if you're looking for ongoing support through pregnancy, postpartum, and your baby's first year, the Beyond Birth Blueprint is our online community for families wherever you are.
