Regression – is that really supposed to be the description of what happens in the mother’s body after birth? There is another explanation for the “tectonic plate shift”, which also fundamentally changes the brain and psyche: That is motherhood!
After the birth I was more than my womb. I was my swollen limbs, my throbbing scar, I was the soft, rippled skin of my stomach, a physical consistency I had never felt or touched before, I was the nothing that surrounded her, the nothing in which a whole person used to live, who was so familiar to me and now completely alien. I was the blood that constantly ran out of my vagina, the palm-sized bloody lumps, I was my breasts, my huge, heavy breasts, and the sore nipples. I was the hunched shoulders of tension, I was my aching back, I was a hunched over, broken gait. There was so much more physical change, so much physical sensation that I hadn’t known about beforebut which I suspected would not go away in six or eight weeks, but would remain, maybe years, maybe forever.
There was so much more sore about me than just my uterus. There was so much more body to me than just my womb—but most importantly, I was more than just my body. It wasn’t just about regressing things. Above all, I wanted to be able to put things in order and understand what was about to develop anew in me.
I was stunned at how overwhelmed I was by all these changes that I couldn’t name. And I didn’t understand why nobody had prepared me for this! “Why didn’t anyone tell us that before?” is a thought shared by many young mothers.
Mothers among themselves: The knowing look
Suddenly friends and acquaintances who had had children before me looked at me differently. Knower, somehow. As if we had all joined a secret society. Once F., who had her second child three months after me, asked me, “It’s really awesome, isn’t it?” I only had to nod – and then we both started to cry.
In general, there is this look that I only gave myself with other mothers, especially in the first year of my motherhood. When we’ve pushed our prams past each other or calmed our crying babies in the carrier at the supermarket checkout. It was them most understanding, compassionate and at the same time most powerless looksthat I received during this time.
I was the soft, wavy skin of my stomach. The nothing that surrounded her
The camouflage cloak of speechlessness that lies over the childbed does not only have to do with social taboos and acute word-finding difficulties of overtired newborns. It is also woven from all that knowledge that does not yet exist. In autumn 2019, when I gave birth to my child, there were not yet certain words, at least in German, that I would have needed to describe my experience – and that my counterpart would have needed to understand me.
Is there something wrong with me?
Because no one around me seemed to understand exactly what was bothering me so much, I too thought there was something fundamentally wrong with me. And so the initial feeling of being overwhelmed and not really understanding what was happening to me turned into something that my gynecologist diagnosed a few months later as a “postpartum adjustment disorder”.
About a year and a half after the birth of my child, when the shifting of the tectonic plates had slowly calmed down in me and I was beginning to get used to my new landscape, I came across accidentally came across the term “motherhood” while scrolling through the internet. And even before I could grasp the context in which that term appeared there, and although I had never read or heard it before, I knew what it meant. I started crying with relief. I had finally found a word for what had confused and also frightened me for so many months. There was nothing wrong with me. And I hadn’t imagined anything either.
The term “motherhood” is made up of the words “mother” and “puberty”. It describes the phase in the life of an expectant mother in which hormonal, neurological, physical and emotional changes take place on a scale similar to that of puberty – only in a much shorter time. These changes begin with the conscious desire to have children, but at the latest with pregnancy, and can last up to two years.
Motherhood: So much more than regression
“Motherhood” is a neologism coined by the doulas and sisters Natalia Lamotte and Sarah Galan. In March 2021, they first published their thoughts on their Instagram page @sisterherzen.doulas in a post. It says: “Knowing about and consciously dealing with the upcoming challenges of becoming a mother and loving support can relieve women and prevent possible feelings of guilt or negative feelings.” The article had piqued my interest, and because I couldn’t find much further information about it, I asked Lamotte and Galan for an interview. In a video call, they told me that they, too, in the course of their work this conflict, this problem without a name had noticed. While they accompanied newborns in the time after the birth, they encountered it in different forms: sometimes as a quiet doubt from a mother who whispered that she was probably not as suitable for being a mother as she thought. Sometimes it was strong mood swings of very ambivalent emotions, sometimes it was the shame of not functioning properly. So Lamotte and Galan started investigating.
Maternity: a vulnerable period of life that can last for several years
They came across the American anthropologist Dana Raphael, who had already made similar observations in the 1970s and evaluated them accordingly. She invented the term matrescence to mark that becoming a mother is not an event lasting several hours, which already ends at the delivery room door. It is an extremely vulnerable phase of life that can last for several years. However, Raphael’s insights found no resonance at the time and fell into oblivion. Until the early 2000s in the USA, researchers in reproductive psychology began to take an interest in the very phase for which Raphael had already found a name.
In 2008, this was developed by the psychologist Dr. Aurélie Athan rediscovered. She set up her own laboratory to research matrescence and now heads a subject at Columbia University in which she passes on her findings (matrescence.com). Among other things, she found out that motherhood affects all people who have been pregnant, have given birth, have been surrogate mothers or have had their child through adoption. according to dr Athan, all those people experienced “an acceleration in different areas that applies to every developmental spurt: biological-psychological-social-cultural-spiritual“.
Pregnancy changes everything
Motherhood is not just a psychological phenomenon. The transformation into a mother is now also being researched by neuroscientists. The Dutch Elseline Hoekzema used various brain scans to show that permanently alters the brain structure of people going through pregnancy and childbirth. She compared her scans to scans from non-mothers and found that the changes were so severe that the computer could tell with 100 percent certainty whether the brains were mothers or not. According to the latest findings, these changes persist even six years postpartum.
The restructuring of the affected brain areas has approximately the same magnitude as the neurological changes we undergo during puberty. Researchers also found that both processes are triggered by the same hormones: never in life are we exposed to a higher concentration of estrogen and progesterone than during puberty and motherhood.
The brain changes to the same extent as during puberty
Up until the 20th century, young people were called “crazy children” because the term “puberty” and thus a greater awareness of this sensitive, transforming phase of life did not yet exist. Puberty has now been well researched. The knowledge we have today is great – as is the awareness that people go through puberty and that this time can sometimes be challenging. To be able to name what is happening in oneself, to have wordsAs we all know from our own youth, being able to identify with and exchange ideas with a group of like-minded people is extremely important and can even be life-saving.
Matrescence and motherhood: research is just beginning
I wish the same for the phase of becoming a mother and for all people who will still go through motherhood.
Some journalistic articles and non-fiction books have already been published in recent years. The scientific research field of matrescence offers great potential. Nevertheless, the research is only at the beginning. However, all the main actors agree on one thing: more knowledge about motherhood is needed to create a realistic awareness of what it means to become a mother.
American psychiatrist Alexandra Sacks, whose main focus is also research and counseling for expectant mothers, gave her impressive 2018 TED talk “A new way to think about the transition to motherhood”. In it she talks, among other things, about the experiences with her clients. She experiences the same situation over and over again: a person who has just given birth comes to her because she is worried about being mentally ill. The reason: she was sure becoming a mother would feel different. “I thought as a mother I would feel complete and happy. I thought through my natural instincts I would know what to do. I thought I would always want to put my child first.”
Ambiguous feelings are the rule
According to Alexandra Sacks, however, these are unrealistic ideas. Not every mother is automatically overjoyed. Not every mother who is ambivalent about motherhood suffers from a mental disorder or illness. On the contrary, Sacks emphasizes, ambivalent feelings are not the exception, but rather the rule: “If women understood the natural process of motherhood, if they knew that in these circumstances ambivalence was normal and nothing to be ashamed of, they would feel less alone, they would feel less stigmatized. And I think this knowledge would even reduce the incidence of postpartum depression. I would love to do some research on that one day.”
In any case, I would be very interested in a study of this kind. To this day I wonder how knowing about motherhood would have affected my mental health in childbirth. I probably would have trusted my perception more. Instead, I had tried to suppress my feelingsbecause they did not correspond to the expectations of society and my family.
Jana Heinicke’s book “Out of the belly. We need to talk about motherhood“ (here is an excerpt) impressed us very much. We would also like to see more studies on “motherhood” and that Jana’s clever considerations find many readers (17 euros, Goldmann).
Further information: Prof. Dr. Svenja Krämer / Hanna Meyer: “Muttertät” (18 Euro, mvg)