matresence

Only by allowing ourselves to feel our sadness can we reawaken to the new possibilities and pleasures offered by the next stage of our lives.

The birth of my first child, after the maelstrom passed, was a deliverance. It brought me closer to my real self. I have learned how to surrender when I need to. I am learning to live in the rhythm of other lives; I have learned to share my life.

Every new mother begins as a child-mother. A child-mother is old enough to have babies and has good instincts in the right direction, but she needs the mothering of an older woman or women who essentially prompt, encourage, and support her in her mothering of her children.

The truth is that motherhood is a hero's journey. For most of us it's not a journey outward, to the most fantastic and farthest-flung places, but inward, downward, to the deepest parts of your strength, to the innermost buried core of everything you are made of but didn't know was there.

Matrescence. ‘The process of becoming a mother, which anthropologists call “matrescence,” has been largely unexplored in the medical community,’ Sacks writes. ‘Instead of focusing on the woman’s identity transition, more research is focused on how the baby turns out. But a woman’s story, in addition to how her psychology impacts her parenting, is i

Unlike other cultures, which treat becoming a mother as a major, traumatic life crisis, with special social rites and rituals, Western societies had been failing to recognize matrescence as a major transition: a transition that involves a whole spectrum of emotional and existential ruptures, a transition that can make women ill, a transition in whi

Over the first year of his life, I deeply reflected upon the connections between birth, breath, and death. After breathing my way through fear, I found myself in a place of profound and visceral love, the most precious of life’s gifts. Motherhood is its own threshold.