Abstract
Motherhood is commonly framed as a role: a set of responsibilities, behaviors, and ideals a woman is expected to embody after the birth of a child. This framing can obscure the psychological, relational, and existential transformation that the literature on matrescence describes. Drawing on Dana Raphael’s (1973) concept of matrescence, later revived and expanded by Athan and Reel (2015) and Athan (2020, 2024), and feminist theories from Rich (1976) to O’Reilly (2016), this paper argues that matrescence is not merely an added role but a developmental and cultural passage in which the mother must renegotiate identity, desire, embodiment, agency, and relational belonging. It contends that dominant narratives of “good motherhood” often require women to collapse the self into function, so that maternal distress, resentment, and loss of desire are misread as individual failure rather than as signals of identity erasure and relational imbalance. The paper proposes that reclaiming the self after birth can be understood as an act of resistance: not a rejection of the child or of mothering, but a refusal to let motherhood become the entirety of a woman’s identity. Particular attention is given to the couple relationship as a central site where matrescence is either witnessed and renegotiated or intensified through invisible labor and emotional loneliness. Implications for clinicians and coaches are considered. By reframing matrescence as both developmental transformation and cultural resistance, the paper invites more honest and relationally sustaining models of maternal support.
Keywords: matrescence, maternal subjectivity, reproductive identity, relational agency, maternal ambivalence, invisible labor, desire, resistance, self-erasure, couple relationship
From Motherhood as Role to Matrescence as Resistance:
Reclaiming Identity, Desire, and Relational Agency After Birth
The Problem with Motherhood as “Role”
Dominant cultural narratives often recognize becoming a mother through the arrival of a child while giving less attention to the reorganization of the mother’s existing self (Athan & Reel, 2015; O’Reilly, 2016). Within these narratives, motherhood is treated as something a woman steps into, almost like a pre-existing costume: she feeds, protects, organizes, sacrifices, remembers, regulates, and provides. Thus, from the lens of this normative framework, the dominant question becomes whether she is performing motherhood well. Yet this question can quietly erase a more important one: What is happening to the person who has become a mother?
This paper does not reject motherhood, caregiving, or maternal devotion. It questions the cultural reduction of motherhood to a role that women must perform at the expense of their complexity. The role of “good mother” arrives pre-loaded with idealized expectations shaped by intensive-mothering discourse: selflessness, emotional availability, intuitive knowing, physical endurance, and constant attunement (Hays, 1996; O’Reilly, 2016). Ruddick (1989) likewise approached mothering as a practice organized around the demands of preservation, growth, and social acceptability, rather than as a fixed maternal essence. These expectations create a split between this idealized maternal image and the mother’s actual lived experience, which includes ambivalence, exhaustion, changes in desire, grief, resentment, tenderness, and identity disorientation, often all at once (Parker, 1995). When motherhood is reduced to role performance, the developmental reality of matrescence becomes invisible. I write as a clinical-counseling psychologist, trained in parenthood as well as couples’ work, and the observations that follow, including the composite vignettes, are grounded in that clinical and coaching work with mothers and couples navigating this transition.
Matrescence as Developmental Passage
The term matrescence was coined by the medical anthropologist Dana Raphael (1973) to name the developmental process of becoming a mother. For decades it remained largely dormant until Athan and Reel (2015) revived it within psychology, calling for a developmental model of motherhood that would normalize rather than pathologize the transition women were undergoing. Athan (2020) later situated this transition within the broader, lifelong process she termed reproductive identity: how a person orients to the questions of if, when, how, and with whom to parent or care. In her most recent working definition, matrescence is “a developmental passage” that is at once biological, psychological, social, cultural, economic, political, ecological, existential, and spiritual in nature (Athan, 2024).
Framing matrescence as a developmental passage “like adolescence” (Athan & Reel, 2015) carries a specific clinical consequence. The psychological changes after birth are not, in themselves, evidence that a woman is failing, ungrateful, too emotional, or not coping. They may instead be signs that her internal world is undergoing a profound reorganization. Matrescence reshapes identity, body image, values, relational needs, sexuality, ambition, time, and emotional sensitivity. A mother may grieve who she was even while loving her child deeply, a grief that can feel culturally impermissible because dominant maternal scripts may misread it as rejection of the child. She may not wish to return to who she was, yet not yet know who she is becoming. Many mothers describe a crisis of recognition: they are seen as mothers, but no longer reliably seen as women, partners, thinkers, creators, professionals, or desiring subjects. Matrescence, on this account, is not the disappearance of the self; it is a complex and potentially generative reorganization that may hold grief, joy, expansion, and disorientation at once, under conditions that often fail to recognize that any such reorganization is taking place (Athan & Reel, 2015; Rodgers et al., 2024).
The Good-Mother Ideal and the Collapse of Personhood Into Function
Rich (1976) drew an enduring distinction between motherhood as lived experience and motherhood as institution, the latter being a set of patriarchal rules and expectations designed to keep women under control. As an institution, motherhood regulates not only how mothers act but how they are permitted to feel; when a woman’s experience diverges from the ideal, that divergence is read as her personal failing rather than as a strain produced by the institution itself. O’Reilly (2016) extended this into what she calls matricentric feminism, arguing that the category of mother is distinct from the category of woman and that normative motherhood functions as a regulatory discourse. Within that discourse, the good mother is expected to anticipate needs, absorb discomfort, manage the emotional weather of the household, and remain grateful. This idealized figure corresponds to what Hays (1996) termed intensive mothering: a culturally dominant standard demanding that mothers expend boundless time, emotion, and material resource on child-rearing, and one rewarded precisely to the degree that the mother’s own needs recede from view. Even contemporary injunctions to “practice self-care” can function as one more task added to the maternal workload rather than as a genuine redistribution of it.
Within this normative discourse, maternal value is often measured through usefulness, and more specifically through how much she gives, remembers, carries, soothes, and endures. Her anger is pathologized, her desire deprioritized, her fatigue normalized, her boundaries reframed as selfishness. This produces a psychological and relational trap: the more she disappears, the more she may be praised as devoted; the more she attempts to return to herself, the more guilt she may feel. The cultural danger here is not that mothers love too much. It is that love for one’s child(ren) becomes confused with self-abandonment. It is worth distinguishing sacrifice from erasure. Sacrifice is sometimes part of love. Erasure is when sacrifice becomes identity. The idealization of maternal selflessness can make a mother’s loss of self appear virtuous when it is, in fact, psychologically and relationally costly. Even Winnicott’s (1958) generative notion of the “good-enough mother,” originally a permission to be ordinary, is too easily conscripted into a higher standard of ceaseless attunement than he ever intended. For Winnicott, the good-enough mother was explicitly not the perfect one. She meets her infant’s needs adequately and then, through small and non-traumatic failures, allows the child to encounter frustration and gradually build the capacity to tolerate reality. What he offered as reassurance, that ordinary devoted care is sufficient, is in contemporary culture frequently inverted into a demand for flawless responsiveness.
Maternal Distress as Signal, Not Only as Symptom
If we consider matrescence, therefore, as the developmental stage that it is, then certain forms of maternal distress can be read as meaningful signals, rather than as symptoms to eliminate. Resentment may mark a boundary that has been crossed repeatedly. Loss of desire may indicate over-identification with service and management. Numbness may signal depletion or protective shutdown. Anger may reveal that a mother’s needs have had no socially acceptable place to go. Loneliness inside the family may point to a failure of mutual recognition rather than a simple lack of help. Parker (1995) argued that maternal ambivalence, the coexistence of love and hostility toward one’s child, is not a defect but a workable and even creative feature of mothering if it can be acknowledged rather than denied.
This argument must be made carefully. The point is not that all distress is wisdom, nor that suffering should be romanticized. Some distress requires clinical assessment, rest, trauma-informed care, or psychiatric treatment, and nothing here should be read as a substitute for that. The claim is more specific: when a mother’s suffering is interpreted only as a personal deficit in coping, the relational and cultural conditions producing that suffering remain untouched. When the relational and cultural conditions producing distress remain unchanged, the distress is likely to recur. The signal is not merely noise; it may be information about what the surrounding system has failed to address.
Desire After Birth: Beyond Libido as Performance
One frequently overlooked casualty of role-based motherhood is desire. Used broadly, desire includes wanting, choosing, longing, creating, resting, and moving toward life as a subject. After birth, many women do not only lose sexual desire; they may lose access to wanting at all. de Marneffe (2004) helped legitimize maternal subjectivity by insisting that a mother’s inner life of desire deserves serious attention rather than dismissal. This is not to claim the field is silent; scholarship has examined sexual wellbeing across the postpartum period (McDonald et al., 2017). What remains comparatively under-examined is desire in the broad sense used here: the mother’s capacity to want at all, apart from the sexual and apart from service to others. This paper extends her move outward: the question is not only what a mother wants from caregiving, but whether she is permitted to want anything that is not, in the same breath, translated into service for someone else.
The conditions that desire requires are precisely the ones early motherhood tends to dismantle. Perel (2006) argues that eroticism depends on space, autonomy, curiosity, and a sense of the partner as a separate, desiring being, all qualities that collapse when a couple fuses into a logistics operation. A mother’s body, meanwhile, is medicalized in pregnancy, made functional in feeding and caregiving, and then evaluated aesthetically afterward (Rodgers et al., 2024). It is touched constantly by the child and yet not always encountered with tenderness, by her partner or by herself. Sexual desire may decline, then, not because love is gone but because the preconditions for desire, such as rest, play, admiration, spaciousness, emotional safety, and the experience of being seen, have quietly disappeared. Postpartum emotional and sexual satisfaction are also associated with how women experience their partner’s contribution to household work (McDonald et al., 2017). Desire cannot thrive where the self is only allowed to be useful. The clinically useful question is therefore not only, “Why does she not want sex?” but, “Where in her life is she still allowed to want?” Reclaiming desire after birth is less about restoring a behavior than about restoring a mother’s relationship to her own aliveness.
A composite pattern from clinical and coaching work illustrates this shift. A mother who initially described the problem as “low libido” also reported that nearly every part of her day was organized around anticipating the needs of her child, partner, work, and household. When asked where she was still allowed to want, she struggled to name any domain untouched by obligation. The clinical task was therefore not to prescribe sexual activity, but to explore whether desire had room to exist anywhere in her life.
The Couple Relationship as a Site of Erasure or Resistance
The couple relationship can either deepen the mother’s disappearance or become the place where her emerging self is witnessed and supported. After children arrive, many couples drift into fixed roles: one becomes the default parent, the other a helper, provider, or secondary caregiver. Even well-intentioned partners can become trapped in unequal systems. Hochschild’s (1989) research on the “second shift” documented how, even in dual-earner households, women continued to carry the larger share of domestic and emotional work; her earlier analysis of emotional labor (Hochschild, 1983) names the largely invisible work of managing one’s own and others’ feelings to keep a system running smoothly. In family life this labor is rarely seen, named, or shared. More recent research indicates that cognitive household labor remains disproportionately borne by mothers and is associated with poorer maternal mental health and relationship functioning (Aviv et al., 2025).
Consider a composite couple drawn from coaching work. A mother reports that she is “fine” but feels invisible; her partner reports that he helps whenever asked and cannot understand her resentment. Both are describing the same structure from opposite sides. He experiences himself as responsive; she experiences herself as the permanent holder of the mental load: the one who must notice, plan, anticipate, and then delegate. The asymmetry is not primarily about effort or goodwill. It is about who owns the family system and who merely assists with it. The transition to parenthood has reorganized the partnership into a management team and left the intimacy behind.
This vignette reflects one recurring pattern in different-gender couples and is not presented as universal. Research suggests that same-sex parents may divide household and parenting labor more equally on average, although inequity can still emerge through relational and structural pathways other than traditional gender roles (Perlesz et al., 2010).
The couple becomes a site of resistance when both partners are willing to ask different questions: What has this transition asked of each of us? What have we each had to silence? What have we normalized that is costing us connection? What needs to be redistributed, practically, emotionally, sexually, and psychologically? Relational agency means the mother is not merely adapting in private while the system stays fixed; the system itself reorganizes around the reality of her transformation. Matrescence, in other words, is not only an event inside the mother. It is a relational event that asks the couple to change.
Reclaiming Identity: The Mother as Subject, Not Only Caregiver
Reclamation does not mean a return to the pre-baby self; that self may no longer fit, and the fantasy of going back can itself become a trap. The developmental task is integration: allowing the mother-self to coexist with the woman-self, the erotic self, the creative self, the intellectual self, and the relational self. In the language of Internal Family Systems (Schwartz, 1995), the parts of a person that have gone quiet under the demands of caregiving are not gone; they are exiled, and they can be heard from again. Reclamation, then, often looks like reclaiming language to name what is happening without shame; reclaiming boundaries by distinguishing devotion from over-functioning; reclaiming the body as a home rather than a service; reclaiming the question “What do I want?” before “What does everyone need from me?”; and reclaiming a relational voice that can say “this is not sustainable” without either collapsing or exploding.
Such resistance is usually quiet. It rarely looks dramatic. It looks like renegotiating night duties (how the burden of nighttime infant care and interrupted sleep is shared between partners), declining visitors, returning to creative work, naming resentment aloud, seeking support, telling the truth about the difficulty of motherhood, or asking a partner to become a full participant rather than an assistant. The work of matrescence is not to become the perfect mother or to arrive at a final state of integration. It is to make room for an ongoing process of integration amid the continuities and disruptions of becoming a mother.
Matrescence as Resistance
This is the conceptual heart of the argument. Resistance, as used here, does not mean opposition to children, family, or love. It means opposition to the cultural and relational forces that demand maternal self-abandonment as proof of maternal goodness. Matrescence becomes resistance when the mother refuses to disappear. Concretely, that refusal includes declining the myth that maternal love should erase ambivalence; rejecting the idea that needing support is weakness; refusing to confuse constant availability with secure attachment; declining to let a relationship survive only through maternal over-functioning; refusing to treat sexual disconnection as the mother’s personal defect; and not feeling forced to ‘perform’ gratitude while quietly drowning.
This reframing connects the individual to the communal, which is the terrain the field of mother studies has long insisted upon. Reclaiming maternal subjectivity affects not only mothers but partners, children, extended kin, and communities. Collins (2000) reminds us that mothering has never been a purely private, nuclear act; practices of “othermothering” and shared care show that the isolated, self-erasing mother is a historically and culturally specific arrangement, not a natural law. This paper therefore resists the assumption that children benefit from maternal self-erasure; caregiving that includes aliveness, boundaries, and repair offers a different relational model. A mother’s return to herself is not a betrayal of the family. It may be one of the conditions for a healthier family system.
Implications for Practice: Supporting Mothers and Couples Differently
If matrescence is developmental, relational, and cultural, then support that individualizes the mother’s struggle will remain insufficient. Familiar advice, such as sleep when the baby sleeps, ask for help, communicate better, schedule intimacy, may be useful, but it leaves identity, power, emotional labor, and relational structure untouched. These questions are drawn from the clinical and coaching practice from which this paper emerges and are intended to open inquiry rather than prescribe a single answer. Practitioners can begin with identity-based questions alongside symptom-based ones: Who do you miss being? What part of you has gone quiet? What are you afraid would happen if you needed more? What version of motherhood are you trying to perform, and where did you learn it? Where do you still feel like a subject in your own life?
Where appropriate and safe, the partner should be included, not to assign blame, but to make the transition genuinely relational. Practitioners can normalize ambivalence without pathologizing it; treat invisible labor as a measurable dimension of relational health; understand desire as contextual rather than merely hormonal or individual; and help mothers distinguish guilt and shame from ethical responsibility. In practice, this may mean shifting a conversation from “How can she cope better?” to “What must change in the distribution of care, power, and recognition?” The broader aim is a shift in the very purpose of support: away from helping women better tolerate impossible expectations, and toward helping families and communities transform those expectations.
Conclusion: The Mother Need Not Disappear for the Child to Thrive
Motherhood as role asks a single question: Are you doing enough? Matrescence as resistance asks a different one: Who are you becoming, and what must be protected so that you do not disappear? To reclaim identity, desire, and relational agency after birth is not an indulgence. It is a psychological, relational, and cultural necessity. To reclaim the self after birth is not to love the child less. It is to refuse a version of motherhood that requires the mother to become less alive so that others may feel cared for. When mothers are allowed to remain subjects, desiring, thinking, bounded, embodied, relationally powerful subjects, families do not become weaker. They become more honest. Matrescence can also enlarge identity, deepen purpose, and awaken previously unknown capacities; acknowledging this growth does not require denying the losses or inequalities that may accompany it. The work of matrescence, then, is not only adaptation. It is resistance: the quiet, necessary, life-giving refusal to disappear.
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