What Is Matrescence?

Understanding the transition into motherhood — and why it changes how we live, work and lead

There is a particular kind of quiet that can happen when you become a mother.

It is not always dramatic. It does not always arrive with tears on the bathroom floor, although sometimes it does. More often, it appears in the small, ordinary moments: opening your laptop after maternity leave and feeling strangely unfamiliar to yourself; sitting in a meeting and realising your tolerance for nonsense has gone; packing the nursery bag while mentally preparing for a presentation; or lying awake at night, long after everyone else has fallen asleep, wondering why a life you worked so hard to build suddenly feels different in your hands.

Many women I work with describe this moment in different ways, but the feeling underneath is often the same. They still love their children. They may still love their work. They are still capable, intelligent, committed and ambitious. And yet, something has shifted. The old ways of measuring success do not quite fit. The old pace feels harder to sustain. The old version of themselves feels close enough to remember, but not close enough to return to.

For years, I did not have the word for this either.

I had worked incredibly hard to build my career. I came to London in my early twenties from a small seaside town near St Petersburg, with a foreign degree, an accent, and the feeling that every door into professional life had to be pushed open with both hands. I grafted. I studied. I climbed from the bottom into bigger and more complex work, eventually leading teams and working in a Fortune 500 environment. So when motherhood came, I was not prepared to let go of what I had worked so hard for. I wanted both: the career and the children, the leadership role and the family life, the ambition and the love.

And for a while, I thought the answer was to become superwoman.

I said yes to more work, more travel, more responsibility, more proving. I loved the comments: “I don’t know how you do it all,” or “You must be made of strong stuff.” They made me feel validated, as though exhaustion was evidence that I was succeeding. But over time, the cost became impossible to ignore. Sleep deprivation, relentless work travel, the emotional weight of parenting, the invisible load at home and the pressure to keep performing at work all gathered in my body. I became irritable and quieter. I withdrew from support. I became, in my own words, a productivity robot. People at work would say, “Wow, you work so fast,” and the superwoman part of me felt satisfied, even as the human part of me was disappearing.

Only much later did I discover that there was a word for the transition I had been living through.

That word is matrescence.

Matrescence describes the physical, emotional, psychological, hormonal, social and identity transition a woman goes through when she becomes a mother. It is often compared to adolescence, because both are profound developmental transitions. In adolescence, a child does not simply become a bigger child; their body, brain, identity, relationships and place in the world all change. Matrescence is similar. A woman does not simply add a baby to her existing life. She changes too.

And this is where so many women feel confused. Because the world often treats motherhood as a practical event. A baby arrives. Maternity leave begins. Childcare is arranged. Work is paused and then resumed. From the outside, it can look like a logistical chapter. But inside, a much deeper re-organisation may be taking place.

Your body has changed. Your brain has changed. Your emotional landscape has changed. Your relationship with time, ambition, success, rest, responsibility and love may all be shifting at once. And because this transition is still so poorly understood, many women assume the discomfort means they are doing something wrong. They wonder why they feel anxious about returning to work after maternity leave, why confidence after maternity leave can suddenly feel so fragile, why they feel guilty all the time, and why they cannot simply “get back to normal.”

But what if the problem is not that you are failing to return to who you were?

What if the deeper invitation is to understand who you are becoming?

For many women, returning to work after maternity leave is the moment matrescence becomes impossible to ignore. It is often the first time they come face-to-face with the question of professional identity after maternity leave: how to reconcile who they were before children with who they are becoming now. You may be going back to the same job, the same office, the same organisation, even the same role. Your colleagues may expect you to pick up where you left off. You may expect that of yourself too. But internally, you may be carrying an entirely new set of questions.

Will I still be taken seriously? Will they think I am less ambitious now? Can I still lead at the same level? Why do I feel less confident after maternity leave? Why does leaving my baby feel so complicated? Why do I want to work and also feel heartbroken about working? Why does everything feel like a trade-off?

This is the experience I think of when I think of Anna: the capable, senior, thoughtful woman returning to leadership after maternity leave. On paper, Anna is ready. The childcare is arranged, the calendar is full, the first-week-back outfit is chosen, and the out-of-office is coming off. When people ask how she feels, she says, “I’m actually looking forward to being back,” because part of her is. She has worked hard for this career. She wants to use her brain. She wants adult conversation. She wants to feel like herself again.

But underneath that readiness, there may be a quieter truth. She is bracing. She is worried her confidence has not fully returned. She is afraid of being seen as different in a way that could cost her. She does not want special treatment, but she also knows she is not returning as exactly the same person. She may be grieving the simplicity of her old professional identity, the one where she could stay late, travel freely, think uninterrupted thoughts and pour herself into work without calculating the impact on everyone else.

This is why matrescence matters so much in the workplace. Not because every mother returns fragile or uncertain, but because many return changed, and we do not yet have enough language, structures or leadership cultures that know how to honour that change.

In my own journey, it took burnout and a lot of honest reflection to realise that motherhood had not made me weaker. It had given me strengths I had not yet integrated into my professional identity. Through coaching, I began to see that the empathy, perspective, resilience, prioritisation and strategic multi-tasking I had developed through motherhood were not separate from leadership. They were leadership. I had spent so long trying to prove I could still be the old kind of strong that I had almost missed the emergence of a new kind of strength.

That realisation changed everything.

I continued leading at work, but my approach became different. I was more relaxed, clearer, wiser. I knew what mattered and what did not. I no longer needed to push quite so hard to prove my value. I started to notice that people in my team were growing, being promoted, believing in themselves. Colleagues came to me for mentoring. I began to see that one of my gifts was helping people recognise their strengths and trust themselves more deeply. This is the thread that eventually led me to create Working Parent Coaching.

Because I could see so many successful women around me walking the same path I had walked: high-performing, capable, admired, and quietly exhausted. Women who had become mothers and were trying to hold on to the exact same definition of success they had built before children, even though their bodies, values, families and inner worlds had changed. Women who did not need a lecture on resilience. They needed space to pause. They needed language. They needed someone to say, “Of course this feels big. You are not imagining it.”

This is the heart of matrescence-informed leadership coaching. It is also why leadership coaching for mothers is becoming such an important area of support, particularly for women returning to demanding professional and leadership roles after maternity leave.

It recognises that motherhood can change your leadership identity. You may become more emotionally aware. You may become more values-led. You may become more protective of your time, more conscious of trade-offs, more willing to question workplace cultures that reward over-functioning. You may become less interested in politics and more interested in purpose. You may find that your ambition has not disappeared at all; it has simply become more honest.

This is not always comfortable. Sometimes it feels like loss before it feels like growth. You may miss the woman who could say yes more easily. You may miss the simplicity of being praised for your availability. You may feel guilty for wanting space, guilty for loving work, guilty for missing work, guilty for not missing it enough. Matrescence can hold all of that. It gives us a way to understand the emotional complexity of becoming a mother without reducing it to either joy or struggle.

It also helps us understand that matrescence does not end when the baby turns one, or when maternity leave ends, or when everyone starts sleeping a little more. It continues to unfold through different seasons of motherhood. There is early matrescence, when everything is raw and new. There is the return-to-work season, when motherhood and professional identity collide in very practical and emotional ways. There is the second-baby season, when returning to work after second maternity leave can feel entirely different because the whole family system has changed. And there is mid-matrescence, when children are older, careers may be more established, and women begin asking new questions about meaning, identity, leadership, ageing, ambition and the kind of life they actually want to be living.

I often say that motherhood can become a portal, but I do not mean that in a fluffy way. I mean that it can bring you into contact with truths you may have been too busy to hear before. It can reveal where you have been over-functioning. It can show you where your boundaries were too porous. It can bring your values into sharper focus. It can make you ask whether the version of success you have been chasing still belongs to you.

For women in leadership, these questions are not indulgent. They are essential.

Because when you lead from a place of constant proving, you may look successful on the outside while slowly losing connection to yourself on the inside. But when you begin to understand your matrescence, you can start to lead with more clarity, more self-trust and more humanity. You can stop treating motherhood as something to hide from your leadership and begin to ask how it has shaped the leader you are becoming.

This is why I believe parenthood should be recognised as a leadership superpower. Not because parenting automatically makes someone a better leader, and not because mothers should have to turn every hard thing into a professional advantage. But because the daily lived experience of caring, prioritising, adapting, repairing, negotiating, noticing and loving through uncertainty develops real human capacities. These are the same capacities organisations say they want in conscious, emotionally intelligent leaders.

The tragedy is that many mothers return to work feeling they have to conceal these changes, when in fact some of these changes may be the very source of their next level of leadership.

So if you are reading this because you searched “what is matrescence?” or “why does returning to work after maternity leave feel so hard?”, I want you to know that there is nothing wrong with you for finding this transition complex. You may be capable and struggling. You may be grateful and grieving. You may be ambitious and tired. You may love your child and miss your old freedom. You may want your career and also want a different relationship with work. These truths can sit beside each other.

Matrescence gives you a map. Not a rigid one, and not one that tells you exactly what to do next. But a map that helps you stop blaming yourself for being inside a profound transition.

This is where coaching can help. While many women initially search for return to work coaching for mums, what they are often looking for is something deeper: a space to make sense of the identity shift, emotional complexity and questions that can emerge as motherhood and career begin to intertwine. In matrescence coaching, we make space for the questions that often get pushed aside by the speed of family and work life. We explore confidence after maternity leave, professional identity after baby, leadership confidence, boundaries, guilt, ambition, the mental load, career decisions, relationship dynamics and the emotional impact of returning to work. Together, we begin rebuilding self-trust in a season where confidence after maternity leave can feel both surprisingly vulnerable and deeply important. We look at what has changed, what still matters, what no longer fits, and what kind of support would help you move forward with more steadiness.

The work is practical, but it is also deeply human. Sometimes it is about planning a return to work. Sometimes it is about preparing for a difficult conversation with your manager. Sometimes it is about rebuilding confidence after maternity leave. Sometimes it is about naming the grief of an old identity. Sometimes it is about remembering what lights you up. Often, it is about helping a woman hear herself think again.

Because so much of modern motherhood is noisy. Advice is everywhere. Expectations are everywhere. The performance of being fine is everywhere. But underneath all of that, there is usually a quieter voice trying to tell the truth.

Matrescence is an invitation to listen to that voice.

Not to throw your old life away. Not to abandon ambition. Not to become someone entirely new overnight. But to stop forcing yourself back into a shape that no longer fits, and to begin the more courageous work of integrating who you have been with who you are becoming.

That is the work I care about.

That is the work I wish I had known about sooner.

And that is the work I now do with mothers in leadership who are ready to come off autopilot, rediscover joy, establish purposeful leadership, and recognise the strengths their matrescence has already given them.

If you are at the beginning of this journey, start gently. Ask yourself what has changed. Ask yourself what you have been carrying quietly. Ask yourself where you are still trying to prove that nothing has changed, even though something important has. And perhaps most importantly, ask yourself what motherhood may be teaching you about the way you want to live and lead now.

You do not have to answer it all today.

But you are allowed to begin.

Ready to understand your own matrescence journey?

Take the Just Matrescence® Leadership Assessment — a reflective tool to help you make sense of who you are becoming, how matrescence may be shaping your leadership, and what you may need most in this season.

Or join the Just Matrescence® Leadership Coaching Circle — an intimate, supportive coaching space for ambitious mothers in leadership who want to feel seen, heard and clearer about their next step.

Motherhood changes us.

The work is learning how to stop hiding that change, and start leading from it.