What Nobody Told You About Becoming a Mother

If you were to think about what you heard about being a mother before becoming one, what do you remember?

What messages surrounded you? 

Which of those messages did you feel were said with support, with kindness, with care?

Many of the mothers I spoke with or worked with show a certain disappointment or even resentment when they reflect on that time, realizing that nobody actually told them the big, complex, messy parts of becoming a mother.

Mothers feel somehow cheated for not having had that wisdom, that circle of women, of elders or close community to pass on the real about motherhood.

Not just about how to care for your baby, not just the practicalities, but about what happens with the mother, how it changes her so deeply, how it can feel truly disorienting and overwhelming. 

The messages surrounding pregnant or future planning-to-be mothers are often merely scratching the surface of what motherhood brings and they portray either an ideal image about motherhood or a negative one, one that paints motherhood in a gloomy doomsday evil: you’ll see when you’re a mom. You think you’re not sleeping now, wait until you’re in it for months.

You’re hearing things like you’ll forget about the pain when you see your baby’s face, you’ll be happy and satisfied OR you hear the somehow vindictive “advice” of women who have found it hard themselves, had little to no support and are now venting through the false sense of relief given by knowing that someone else will also feel this hard, ha! 

This is a very toxic binary and one that shows only some aspects of motherhood that might pop up and that are transitory and that certainly don’t reflect the journey you’re about to embark on. 

Nobody goes deep to talk about the complex transformation that becoming and being a mother brings, nobody speaks about the inner happenings, about the rich inner life that unfolds inside you, with no voice to speak it or eyes to see it. And that is many times because mothers lack words to describe this immense transformation. 

They don’t know that what they’re experiencing is huge, that it’s experienced by all women all over the world and it has a name. They don’t have a framework and a context to support their experiences and a common language that makes it easier and safe to share their feelings, their challenges. 

The transformation a woman undergoes when she become a mother has a name: MATRESCENCE.

That is why, part of my mission as a certified Seasons of Matrescence® Guideis making MATRESCENCE known to you, as a real and palpable transformation, one that follows a pattern, one that carries wisdom and gifts. I want to support you to give words to your inner seasons of matrescence, to put what you’re going through on a map, one that guides all mothers, so that your experience makes sense to you, gives you power and knowledge about yourself. 

Knowing about matrescence as it unfolds, knowing about it before you become a mother allows you to put your experience into words, to give meaning to what you’re going through and to make the unconscious, conscious.

When you know that this huge transformation is meant to change you, to feel hard, that you’re meant to have support and offer yourself compassion and kindness along the way, when you know that all mothers go through this, you start feeling less alone. You find a sense of sisterhood that connects you with all the mother of the earth and you know that there is a rhythm in this seemingly random and chaotic journey. 

Matrescence will rock all your boats, it will throw out what you don’t need and make room for the new, it will stretch you and push you beyond where you’ve been before.

It will also be a process that takes time and asks you to constantly renegotiate your values, your priorities and your life.  

Matrescence will welcome you into this new realm of mothers, that is filled with fascinating insights, amazing discoveries and also challenging times, high expectations and shadows to face.

It will feel confusing and hard. It will also feel empowering. And it will ultimately feel unique to yourself. 

It will take all of you to go through it and it will teach you that all the cycles you’re going through have meaning, uncover gifts and that you’re asked to connect to yourself and to what truly matters to you in order to welcome a new you, to change and adapt, to grow and shift, to expand. 

Matrescence will open the doors to all the corners of your being, revealing what you need to let go of in order to grow and birth new versions of yourself.

If you want to start exploring your matrescence and don’t know where to start, I invite you to take these steps with me in a Explore Your Matrescence Session. We go gentle, you feel held and you allow your story to have a voice.

✨

holding space for you, mama,

Simona