We prepare women extensively for birth.
We teach them how to swaddle. How to latch. How to track contractions and install car seats and decode wake windows.
But according to matrescence expert and workplace advocate SARA PANTRY, we rarely prepare women for the thing that changes them most profoundly:
Themselves.
The Transition We Don’t Have Language For
There’s a reason adolescence feels culturally understood. We expect teenagers to change. We anticipate emotional upheaval, identity shifts, unpredictability.
Motherhood, somehow, gets treated differently.
“Matrescence is actually only impacting women,” Sara explains. “It’s something that often goes invisible to the naked eye.”
That invisibility matters.
Because when women don’t have language for what they’re experiencing, they struggle to ask for support. And when the world around them doesn’t acknowledge the scale of the transformation, they start questioning themselves instead.
Sara describes her own early experience of motherhood as paralysing.
She had done everything “right.” Read the books. Taken the classes. Prepared meticulously.
And then she found herself overwhelmed by decisions, anxiety, isolation, and the crushing feeling that she was somehow already failing her son.
“All the success measures I had built my life on—they didn’t work in this situation,” remembers Sara.
The Myth of “Bouncing Back”
If there’s one phrase Sara would happily retire forever, it’s bounce back.
Not just physically. Emotionally too. Because motherhood doesn’t leave women untouched.
Sara references research showing that pregnancy and motherhood create measurable structural changes in the brain—changes so profound that AI can reportedly distinguish mothers from non-mothers based on brain scans alone.
And yet culturally, women are still expected to return to work, relationships, and life as though nothing fundamental has changed.
“The workplace expects you to be the same person you were when you left,” she says. “And you now feel like you don’t fit.”
Redefining the “Good Mother”
Perhaps the most liberating part of Sara’s work is her insistence that women are allowed to redefine motherhood for themselves.
Not according to Instagram. Not according to their upbringing. Not according to some impossible 1950s archetype of endless patience and availability.
“We are holding ourselves to expectations that aren’t actually important to us,” she notes. So her solution is to ask:
What does being a good mother mean to me?
What kind of woman do I want to be alongside that?
Because the tension many women feel isn’t failure.
It’s conflict between inherited expectations and actual reality.
And sometimes, the healthiest thing you can do is let some of those expectations burn.
The Takeaway
Matrescence isn’t a phase you complete.
It’s an ongoing evolution.
And maybe the goal isn’t to master it perfectly.
Perhaps the goal is simply to stop fighting the transformation long enough to let it teach you something.
Want to understand why motherhood can feel so disorienting—and so transformative—all at once?
🎧 Listen to the full episode with Sara Pantry on The Forties Formula podcast for a conversation on matrescence, identity, work, grief, ambition, and the kind of support women actually need.