We Should All Know the Term "Matresence"

I was a journalist covering prenatal and maternal health for years before I had kids. I thought I was so prepared for anything new motherhood threw at me…yet when I finally had my twins, I felt completely unmoored. 

I didn’t have the language to describe what I was feeling — I just knew that I didn’t feel like me. But it turns out, there is a word for that transition, and if I had known that word, I would have been able to make sense of what I was feeling. 

Matresence is that word, and it’s one we should put into public consciousness. Yet once again, women are denied the knowledge and the information they need in order to understand their own health and what they’re experiencing.

Matresence refers to the complex process of becoming a mother. It’s a process that changes you in every way, yet it’s one nobody ever prepares new mothers to face. And that’s why we need the word “matresence” to be made mainstream…and why it’s so frustrating that we still haven’t achieved that progress.

The word “matresence” doesn’t appear in the dictionary (yet somehow the term “IDGAF” does?) and we’re long overdue for that to change. Peanut, an app designed for moms to make friends with one another, is leading the charge here: They’ve taken out a full-page ad in the New York Times devoted to this cause.

This isn’t just a maternal issue, it’s a women’s health issue, too. I’m a mom who loves being a mom. I’m also a woman who firmly believes in sharing the realities of what motherhood truly looks like so the women who come after me can make informed reproductive choices. And when we deprive them of the true understanding of what becoming a mother truly looks like, we’re essentially stripping their ability to make a choice with all the necessary information.

The fact that matrescence isn’t a widely used or recognized term — that it’s not even in the dictionary, while all sorts of social media-made slang terms find their way into the book —  is indicative of something so much larger. It all comes down to how little information we give women about their own bodies and lives. Our institutions won’t talk about it, so we have to have the conversations ourselves — and those conversations are a lot easier to have when we have the type of language they require.