When my daughter was born, it felt like my entire brain reorganized itself. I didn’t recognize the self I had been before I became a mother. The world was changed, and I felt raw inside of it.
Frantically, in between contact naps and feeding sessions, I searched the internet for an explanation for the transformation that had overcome me — and I found the term matrescence, which refers to the intense biological, psychological and social changes a woman undergoes throughout pregnancy, birth and the postpartum period.
When I texted my sisters and mom friends about the new term I had learned, a red squiggle showed up underneath it. In my phone’s world (as well as Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English dictionaries), the word matrescence didn’t exist — and the radical change I had undergone had no name.
That’s what Peanut, a social networking app for women, is trying to change. In collaboration with Tommee-Tippee, a baby brand best known for its bottles, Peanut took out a full-page ad in the New York TImes. The ad reads plainly: “IDGAF is in the dictionary, matrescence isn’t. It’s time to GAF about mothers.” Included is a QR code, which when scanned brings users to a Change.org petition that demands Merriam-Webster, the Oxford University Press and tech companies add matrescence to the dictionary. Peanut’s suggested definition of matrescence is: “1. The physical, psychological, emotional and social process of becoming a mother. 2. The most profound neurological reorganization of the adult human brain observed to date.”
Michelle Battersby, the president of Peanut, came across the term matrescence the way I did, in the throes of the postpartum period. Though the term was coined in 1973 by anthropologist Dana Rafael, it became more mainstream with the release of journalist Lucy Jones’s 2024 book, Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood.
When Battersby first heard the word matrescence, she felt a moment of recognition: This was what was happening to her brain and body. Here, finally, was an explanation for the breadth of what she was experiencing. “If we can’t name something, how can we support it?” Battersby told me. “How can we prepare for it? How can we understand it? It’s really about feeling seen and understood.”
There’s science behind the idea of matrescence as a distinct period in a person’s life: Studies have found that a new mother’s brain changes during her first pregnancy, in ways that last for at least two years. Gray matter shrinks, allowing for increased processing and understanding of social cues. Research shows that the impact of motherhood on the brain could be as great as the changes a brain undergoes during puberty. The reward circuit of the brain also changes, which helps new mothers have a special responsiveness to their children. As Lucy Jones summed it up in Matrescence, “My brain was now literally a new brain.”
But does it really matter if the term matrescence is in the dictionary or not? According to Jones, the author of Matrescence, it does — and the fact that a word that is over a half century old isn’t widely recognized reflects the culture women mother in. “I think it underlines the separation of the public and private spheres that happened profoundly in industrial capitalism,” Jones told me in an e-mail. “It is convenient to keep maternal work hidden and devalued, for lots of different reasons, particularly economic.”
If we can’t name something, how can we support it? How can we prepare for it? How can we understand it? It’s really about feeling seen and understood.
In a press release, Peanut underlined the dire consequences of underestimating the period of matrescence, including the fact that maternal mental health research is “drastically underfunded” and that the World Health Organization has identified maternal isolation as a growing public health crisis. 2025 survey data moreover shows that while 66% of U.S. mothers experienced postpartum mental health issues, more than half (56%) reported receiving little or no support.
Peanut also noted that 67% of mothers have never heard the term matrescence, leaving millions of mothers without the word to describe what is happening to them. “Without a word for the transition to motherhood, it is easy to pathologize and minimize this vast and varied experience, and also not to interrogate and analyse the social conditions which are currently making it so difficult for women and families,” Jones adds.
When I first heard the term matrescence, I felt like a weight was lifted off my shoulders. Here was the word for what I was going through. I wasn’t crazy and I wasn’t alone. I was in the middle of a metamorphosis: matrescence.
