When the Famous “Having It All” Starts to Feel Heavy: The Quiet Evolution of Mid-Matrescence

You wake early. You work, parent, lead, and hold so much together. You have been doing this for years. You are essentially a “pro” when it comes to career and parenting!

From the outside, life looks fulfilled and successful. You have a career, a gorgeous family, financial stability, nice holidays a couple of times a year. But lately, something feels off. There’s a quiet ache beneath the busy-ness, beneath the success, like a strange restlessness, heaviness in the chest. It comes out of nowhere.  

I like to visualise it as your compass needle trying to find that true north, but it keeps moving around the dial … remember that scene from Stanger Things when the compass spins round and round and points the kids in the wrong direction? It’s like that, minus the mind flayer.

This is mid-matrescence, the unspoken second wave of transformation that many women experience when their children become more independent and their own identity begins to shift again.

We talk about adolescence as a rite of passage, but rarely acknowledge that matrescence, the becoming of a mother, is one too. It’s not a single event, it unfolds in layers over time. And as Amy Taylor-Kabbaz, founder of Mama Rising, reminds us:

“Matrescence’s role is to awaken us — as individuals and as a collective — to all the false truths and bring us to the truth.”

That moment you realise you’ve outgrown your old self

By your late thirties or forties, the version of you who sprinted through the early years, juggling meetings and nappies, starts to feel distant. You’ve achieved so much, you love your kids, yet you find yourself asking: “Is this it?”…

I honestly believe that mid-matrescence is an invitation to pause, just for a little while, to listen, and to ask who you are now, and not just as a mother, but as a leader, a partner, a woman with her own evolving needs and values.

In Mama Rising movement, one of the key teachings is to redefine strength, to move away from the “Superwoman” ideal that measures worth by productivity. As Amy writes:

“There is strength in my ‘no’, and strength in my ‘can you help me’.”

This reframing for me is deeply in the heart of mid-matrescence. It helps us re-centre and unlearning the unhelpful belief that holding it all together is the only path to success, and realising that real leadership begins with alignment, not endurance. Oh gosh, it’s just so liberating when you truly look up and start believing that.

The rigged system, and why you’re not the problem

For decades, pretty much since the 1970s, women have been told to work like they don’t have children and raise children as if they don’t work. The have been told to make motherhood look easy. As Amy Westervelt puts it bluntly:

“We expect women to work like they don’t have children and raise children as if they don’t work.”

So we grew up believing we can do it all and, have it all and when we finally realise that we are burning out, we internalise it as personal failure, instead of recognising the actual reality:  that it’s not us, the current system was never designed with matrescence in mind.

But awareness changes everything. Awareness is ALWAYS the beginning of change as my beautiful mentor coach tells me when I forget my bearings. Once you see the reality, you can begin to rewrite the story, you realise that you can choose values that fit the woman you’re becoming, not the one the world expected you to be.

Choosing yourself isn’t selfish, it’s leadership

The courage to stop, realign, and listen to your own rhythm is not indulgent. It’s how transformation begins. It’s how we start to model a new kind of leadership, a kind of leadership where it’s ok to trust your mind AND your body AND your intuition, your empathy and make conscious choices instead of continuing to react like we had to in early motherhood.

Here is another beautiful quote from Amy:

“Trust yourself and your voice. Trust that the universe has your back. Trust that this is all part of your becoming.”

When we allow that trust to guide us, something beautiful happens we remember our own wisdom. We all have it but we forget that we do, and look for the answers on the outside. Trust me on this one, we know, we deeply know and have so much wisdom, by the time we reach mid-matrescence it’s cooked and ready to come out!

So here is my invitation,

If this season feels tender, uncertain, or quietly questioning, just listen in. What is this quiet voice telling you. Listen in for when your mind says yes but something in your body is saying no. This is your wisdom trying to talk to you, and to help you and to guide you.

What is your mid-matrescence season telling you?