The Version of You That Goes Back
You hold it together through the daycare handoff... and then you break apart.
The daycare drop-off goes fine.
You hold it together through the handoff. You say the things you’re supposed to say to the provider. You walk back to your car. And somewhere in the first few blocks of traffic, you catch yourself in the rearview mirror, and for just a second, you don’t quite recognize the person looking back.
Not in a dramatic way. Not in a way you’d tell anyone about. Just — something is slightly off. The face is the same. But something behind the face is different, and you can’t locate it, and the light turns green and you keep going.
This is matrescence.
Anthropologist Dana Raphael coined the term in 1973 and it never quite made it into the mainstream conversation. It refers to the developmental process of becoming a mother — the biological, psychological, and identity-level transformation that happens when a woman has a child. It’s the maternal equivalent of adolescence: a transition so significant that the person who comes out the other side is genuinely not the same as the one who went in.
Nobody talks about it like that. We talk about postpartum depression, which is a clinical condition and a real one. We talk about work-life balance, which is a category that mostly doesn’t account for the actual weight of what’s happening. We talk about going back to work as if going back means returning to a prior self — as if you can step back into who you were before, pick up where you left off, and simply also be a mother.
You can’t. You’re not that person anymore.
This isn’t loss, exactly. It’s more complicated than loss. You’ve gained something — something enormous and irreversible and wanted. But the gaining doesn’t come without the changing. And the changing is something nobody prepares you for, because it would require admitting that the version of you who left on leave is not going to be the version of you who comes back.
What comes back instead is a woman who knows some things she didn’t know before. What her body can do. What sleep deprivation actually feels like over months. What it means to love something that cannot yet advocate for itself. What she’s willing to fight for. What she’s no longer willing to perform.
That woman is, in many ways, more. More herself in certain ways. More clear about certain things. More done with certain performances she used to maintain without noticing.
She’s also in a body that’s tired and a mind that’s reorganizing itself and a professional context that was not designed for her — or rather, that was designed for the version of her that existed before.
The question worth sitting with is not: how do I get back to who I was?
It’s: who is going back, and what does she need?
Not from the pump schedule or the childcare plan. Those things matter and they’re covered in the Empower Your Return course. What she needs from herself — the honest accounting of what has changed, what she wants, what she’s willing to hold and what she isn’t.
That accounting is the thing that makes the return sustainable instead of just survivable.
If you’re in this — if you’re looking in the rearview mirror and not quite recognizing the person — you don’t have to navigate it alone. That’s what this work is for.