The Parent You Are Becoming Can Keep the Person You Were

There is a particular kind of vertigo that arrives a few months in, usually during something ordinary. You are pushing a stroller past a place you used to go on Thursday nights, and you realize you cannot remember the last time you thought about it. Not that you gave it up. That it quietly stopped being part of how you describe yourself.

That absence is worth taking seriously. Not as evidence that you have lost something, but as evidence that something happened to you, and that nobody warned you it would.

The push and the pull

There is a name for what is happening, and it helps to have it.

Matrescence, a term coined by medical anthropologist Dana Raphael in 1973, describes the developmental transition to motherhood as a whole-body and whole-person change, comparable in scope to adolescence. Reproductive psychiatrist Alexandra Sacks popularized the term more recently, and her framing is the useful part: patients would contact her convinced they had postpartum depression, describing distress that did not meet the clinical criteria. They were not ill. They were in the middle of an identity transition that has no standard medical vocabulary, which made it indistinguishable from a disorder.

Sacks describes the internal experience as a push and a pull. The pull is toward the baby: attention, oxytocin, preoccupation, the sense that this small person is now the center of the map. The push is toward everything else the person was: work, friendship, sleep, sex, solitude, ambition, the parts of an identity that existed before.

Both are real. Both are legitimate. The difficulty is that only one of them gets congratulated, so the other one gets experienced as guilt.

Interests are not a betrayal

The first casualty is usually the private list of things you did because you liked them.

Not the impressive ones. The ones with no productive justification: the running that was never a race, the books, the instrument you were mediocre at, the show you watched with someone, the long Sunday walk that had no destination. These are the first to go, because they are the easiest to defer and the least defensible when someone asks why you need the time.

Notice that the argument for keeping them is not that they make you a better parent. That framing is common and it is a trap, because it makes your interior life a parenting input, subject to review for effectiveness. The better argument is simpler. They are yours, and you are still a person who has them.

Sacks frames the goal as integration rather than return. Not getting the old self back, which is not available, but carrying the parts of it forward into the new configuration. Continuity, not restoration.

Friendships on a new schedule

The second casualty is friendship, and the mechanism is different. You did not choose to drop anyone. The logistics simply stopped overlapping.

The friendships that survive this period are usually not the closest ones by history. They are the ones with the lowest activation energy: the friend who will take a phone call while you push a stroller, the one who does not need a plan made two weeks out, the one who is fine with a forty-minute visit that ends abruptly.

The useful move is to lower the bar deliberately and say so. "I cannot do dinner for a while, but I can do a walk on Saturday mornings." Naming the reduced format keeps the friendship alive at a size that actually fits, which is better than maintaining the old format in theory and not seeing anyone in practice.

The private interior

There is a third thing, quieter than the other two, and it is the one most people do not say out loud.

Some of what gets lost is not an activity but a quality of attention: the ability to be absorbed in something without a part of your mind tracking a monitor. The capacity to be uninterested in anyone's needs for an hour. The version of you that was not permanently on call.

That is not restored by scheduling a hobby. It is restored by protected time with genuinely transferred responsibility, where someone else is holding the picture and you are not, which is a different and much harder thing to arrange than an hour off.

Continuity over return

A few things worth holding onto in the middle of this.

The transition is not a loss to be grieved and then replaced, and it is not a project to be optimized. It is a change in configuration, and configurations can hold more than one thing at a time. The person who liked the Thursday nights and the person pushing the stroller are not competing candidates. They are the same person, at a different ratio.

The old self is not waiting somewhere to be reclaimed, and you are not behind on getting back to them. They are not a place. They are a set of things you still like, and they can be carried forward a piece at a time, imperfectly, on a schedule that does not match anyone's timeline but yours.

You do not have to return to who you were. You are allowed to keep them.

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Related reading: Visit the Gaux Journal family hub at gaux.org/journal/family, and Gaux classes on the transition to parenthood.

Sources and further reading

• Sacks, A., "Matrescence: The Developmental Transition to Motherhood," Psychology Today (2019), on Dana Raphael's 1973 coinage of the term. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/motherhood-unfiltered/201904/matrescence-the-developmental-transition-to-motherhood
• Sacks, A., "The Birth of a Mother," The New York Times (2017). https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/08/well/family/the-birth-of-a-mother.html
• Sacks, A. and Birndorf, C., What No One Tells You: A Guide to Your Emotions from Pregnancy to Motherhood (2019). https://openlibrary.org/works/OL20153567W
• Stern, D., The Motherhood Constellation (Basic Books, 1995). https://openlibrary.org/works/OL2726304W

Matrescence is a descriptive framework from anthropology and reproductive psychiatry, not a clinical diagnosis, and it is presented here as such.

Continue with the Family Journal and Gaux classes.