Rebrandia
Life & mindset coaching for those ready to close the gap between who they are and who they know they can be.
© Rebrandia Coaching. All Rights Reserved.
Nobody warns you that becoming a mother means losing yourself first.
There's actually a word for this — matrescence, the developmental transition into motherhood, first named by an anthropologist decades ago and still barely known outside of clinical circles. It's the same category of shift as adolescence: hormonal, neurological, psychological, identity-level. And almost nobody talks about it, because our culture only has room for one story about new motherhood — pure joy, instant bond, a baby who completes you. Nobody tells you that becoming someone's mother might mean grieving who you were before her, at the exact same time you're falling in love with her.
The joy is real. It's also not the whole story, and pretending it is leaves an enormous number of new mothers thinking something is uniquely wrong with them when the harder feelings show up.
Your identity doesn't gently expand to include "mother." For a while, it can feel like it gets replaced by it. The person who had hobbies, a body that felt like her own, friendships she didn't have to schedule three weeks out — she doesn't get a graceful handoff. She just goes quiet, while you're too exhausted and too in love and too underslept to notice she's missing until much later.
My daughter, Aurélia (Ellie for short) came full-speed into the world on a crisp April morning in 2024— after almost 30 hours of excruciating labor and real complications. When I finally held the little being I'd carried for nine months and waited for what felt like a lifetime, it was an out-of-body kind of joy. I don't think words actually reach the size of it.
At first, the adrenaline carried us. My husband and I had prepared for this — the house stocked with diapers and tiny onesies, her room decorated, the books read, a post-birth plan in place. All of it genuinely helped, for about a week or two.
What we weren't ready for was the reality underneath the preparation. A kind of exhaustion neither of us had ever experienced. The way any cry, any flicker of discomfort on her face, could send us straight into panic. The fact that we couldn't do anything at all beyond survive.
For me, the shift into motherhood was earth-shattering in a way I hadn't expected. Somehow I'd assumed I would be the exact same person I was before she left my body. Instead, that girl — that version of me — was clinging on for dear life while a new version fought to come through and take over. I struggled deeply with postpartum depression and anxiety, worried every moment of every day about whether I was doing things right. Not just right. Perfectly. I hated the body I was in — the girl who'd always been fit had gained 110 pounds and now couldn't climb a flight of stairs without stopping to catch her breath.
Once the adrenaline wore off, what was left was a shell of myself I didn't have time to heal, and a new identity forming that I didn't have time to figure out — because I was needed for something far more important. Keeping my daughter alive and happy.
I think of it like an atom bomb going off. In an instant, everything you thought you knew about life, about yourself, is incinerated. You're shattered, and you can't put the pieces back together, because the pieces don't exist anymore. You have to build an entirely new identity and existence, with no manual.
In the past, when something earth-shattering happened, I had the luxury of slowing down — turning inward, exploring, healing, growing at my own pace. This time, I was barreling down the road at a thousand miles an hour, trying to do all of that at once, because I didn't have the luxury of slowing down. For the first year of her life, I went through the most extreme dark night of the soul I could have ever imagined — and I mean that literally, because I'd never experienced anything like it before. I had nothing to compare it to.
On top of that: I refused all of it. No nanny. No daycare. I hadn't made friends yet, and I hadn't prioritized it. Our families lived an ocean away. I did it all, completely alone, because somewhere underneath, I believed that needing help meant something was wrong with me — that a good mother didn't need a village, she just handled it.
I was struggling far more than I let anyone see. My mental health was at a real low that whole year, and I hid it well enough that most people had no idea. I had lost myself, and I was trying to survive that loss entirely by myself, which is close to the worst possible way to survive it.
We built a village, finally, once I couldn't keep pretending I didn't need one. A crèche that aligned with how we wanted to raise her. A group of women with kids the same age, similar values — people I intentionally sought out, who I could lean on, ask questions, get guidance from, and who reminded me to prioritize my own wellbeing when I'd forgotten how. My mother, staying longer, more often. Eventually, a nanny, on the weeks it was genuinely too much to do any other way.
But the help alone wasn't the whole shift. What actually changed things was learning to go with the flow — to be imperfect, to stop holding on to my old self like my life depended on getting her back. I had to accept that I needed to grow into someone else entirely. That the old version of me was gone, and I needed to grieve her before I could let her go.
That grief came with its own new work: learning to love myself as I was, in that broken, half-built place. Offering myself compassion instead of a performance review. Setting the goals I wanted for myself without demanding I hit them before Ellie was old enough for me to have the capacity — shelving them, on purpose, while still trusting I'd get back to "me" eventually.
It also meant learning to lean on my husband without guilt — undoing an old trauma response that had made me hyperindependent long before she was born. And it meant learning, slowly, to actually ask for help: to let her go to crèche, to ask my mom to come stay, to build mom-friendships on purpose instead of waiting for them to happen.
Everything got better once I stopped trying to do it alone. My mental health recovered. I found my way back to hobbies I'd forgotten I loved. I could show up for my clients with my full brain instead of my exhausted leftovers. I could rest, actually rest, for the first time since she was born.
None of that happened because I found the right routine or the right mindset trick. It happened because I let myself grieve who I used to be, and let people actually show up for who I was becoming instead.
The hardest part of matrescence isn't the sleep deprivation, though that's real too. It's the belief that quietly takes over during it — that needing help means failing, that a good mother sacrifices herself completely and doesn't ask for anything back, that struggling is proof you're doing it wrong instead of proof you're human.
That belief doesn't announce itself. It just shows up as guilt every time you consider asking for help, and relief every time you don't need to. If you recognize that pattern, it's worth naming clearly: that's not motherhood. That's an old belief, wearing a diaper bag.
The same thing that helps with any core belief: real, repeated evidence that contradicts it. Ask for one small thing from one person, and let yourself notice it went fine. Do it again. Build a village piece by piece, the same unglamorous way you'd rebuild any belief — not because you finally deserve help, but because needing it was never actually evidence you were failing.
If you're in the middle of losing yourself right now, underslept and unsure who you are on the other side of this — you're not doing it wrong. You're going through a real, named, developmental transition that our culture forgot to warn you about. And the version of you on the other side isn't gone. She's just waiting for you to stop trying to find her alone.