‘Matrescence’ Isn’t In The Dictionary. But It Should Be

I hadn’t really come across the term ‘matrescence’ before becoming a mother.

Then one day, in the throes of trying to look after a small child – desperately sleep-deprived to the point of hallucinating, trying to fight the intrusive thoughts and anxiety every time they got a sniffle, and hearing the sound of her crying from the shower (when she was, in fact, fast asleep) – my Instagram algorithm pointed me to a post where a parenting influencer described what it was.

And suddenly, I felt seen.

For the uninitiated, matrescence describes the process of becoming a mother – it’s all the physical, psychological and emotional changes you go through after the birth of a child (of which, spoiler, there are a lot.)

I’m four years in and while there are still glimmers of who I was before having kids, I am fundamentally changed. My body is different. My brain certainly is. My personality is even different (I certainly feel more serious than I used to be).

It is the different that comes from the responsibility of a) keeping someone alive but b) trying not to mess them up. It’s the years of disrupted sleep, navigating relationship and friendship changes, hormone shifts, mental health challenges, physical health changes (hello mastitis and pelvic floor issues), your new work-life-parenting balance.

It is also the different that comes from holding their tiny hands while they sleep and feeling like you could explode with love. Or the pride that makes your eyes water and takes your breath away when they do something even seemingly insignificant (like sing you a song, or draw a picture that actually resembles a person and not a genital).

While the term has been knocking around for almost half a century – it was coined by the anthropologist Dana Raphael in the 1970s – it still hasn’t made it to (some) major dictionaries. And if that doesn’t sum up the quiet and often invisible struggle of motherhood, I don’t know what does.

It’s something Peanut, a community app for mums, and parent-care brand Tommee Tippee are seeking to change by calling for recognition of the word matrescence. There have been books written about it, for crying out loud, so it certainly feels overdue.

In February, the brands shared a full-page ad in the New York Times, urging lexicographers, including those at Oxford English and Merriam-Webster, to add the term to their dictionaries. (Big shout out to Cambridge Dictionary which is leading the way.)

Not only that, but they want digital platforms to stop flagging matrescence as a misspelling – yes, that infuriating red wiggly line is repeatedly showing up even as I write this.

Research has confirmed that motherhood fundamentally reshapes the brain, body, and identity. I have felt this, deeply – as I’m sure many other mothers will have.

But 67% of British mothers have never even heard the term matrescence, leaving them to navigate one of the most significant transitions of their lives without the language to describe it.

“Your phone treats matrescence like it’s a typo,” said Michelle Kennedy, founder and CEO of Peanut.

“The dictionary knows ‘ghosting’. It knows ‘selfie’. It knows ‘delulu’. But the word for what happens when a woman’s brain physically rewires, when her identity shatters and rebuilds, when she goes through one of the most seismic shifts in human biology? Not there. That’s erasure.”

For many mothers, however, this word can help explain a lot. It can also help them feel seen. Dr Sarah McKay, neuroscientist and author, explained: “This one word would have changed my world when my boys were babies. The grace I’d have given myself if I’d known that becoming a mother was a process.

“For what it’s worth, I still consider myself deep in matrescence 18 years later – learning to mother my firstborn while he’s away at uni.”

Experts are concerned that when an experience has no name, it gets minimised. Mothers have their struggles dismissed as baby blues, hormones, or simply just ‘part of the job’.

“Most women go through the biggest transformation of their lives thinking something is wrong with them,” said Michelle Battersby, president of Peanut.

“Getting this word into the dictionary is the first step toward the research, funding, and support that mothers have been denied for generations.”

I’ve contacted Merriam-Webster and Oxford English to see if they’ll consider adding matrescence to their dictionaries and will update the article when I hear back.

If teens get ‘adolescence’ to describe the period when they’re developing into adults, surely we can make room for an equivalent that describes the seismic shift for mothers? I don’t think a word is too much to ask.