We need to tell the truth about what motherhood does to women

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The other day Zoe Blaskey went on to a busy shopping street with a sign saying “matrescence” and asked people what they thought it meant. A lot of them went with “mattress company” and some thought it might be a lingerie brand. In a way, they weren’t totally wrong: there was a lumpy old mattress quality to me, literally and spiritually, after I became a mother.
We know what to expect from the hormonal storms and identity shifts of adolescence. We are hearing ever more about the menopause, adolescence’s paired bookend. Blaskey found no one on the street who knew about the one in the middle: matrescence, the physical, psychological and social transformation that females go through when they become mothers. She wasn’t surprised.
Blaskey is the British founder of Motherkind, a podcast with five million downloads, and has now written a book of the same name. She also works as a coach for hundreds of mothers including CEOs of multinational firms (she is booked up six months in advance).
Matrescence is, Blaskey says, the “new menopause”, in that our ignorance and misunderstanding of the phenomenon can leave women questioning their mental health, while their physical health concerns persist untreated and their attempts to retain a valued role in society feel unsupported.
“I’m so passionate about it because I think so much of what mothers experience is encapsulated in that one word,” Blaskey says. “When I explain it to women, their shoulders drop. There’s often tears. They realise they’re not doing it wrong. They’re going through their matrescence.”
I meet Blaskey in a glamorous hotel high above the beach in Bournemouth, near where she lives. She is dressed in white jeans and has a deep coastal-living tan.
If you squinted from the ocean light beyond this window you might imagine this 41-year-old was a Californian whose life was always golden. That’s until you hear her voice, that of a down-to-earth ally from Warwickshire, the kind of person whose eye you catch across a nerve-shredding baby group, saving your sanity.
Matrescence, of course, isn’t exactly like the menopause. It’s a choice, not a rite of passage. A 2022 study from the Office for National Statistics showed that nearly a fifth of 45-year-old women in England and Wales had not had children, a trend that looked likely to increase.
Blaskey isn’t trying to come across like Andrea Leadsom, the erstwhile Conservative leadership candidate who suggested in 2016 that motherhood gave her the edge on her rival Theresa May.
Blaskey instead focuses on one specific and seismic part of most women’s lives that she believes is grossly underserved. She is on a one-woman drive for matrescence education to be built into schooling, antenatal classes and government policy.
“I’ve lost count of the number of GPs who get in touch and say they recommend the podcast at the six-week check-up,” Blaskey says.
Back then, though, it was Blaskey who was in trouble. Now her daughters are eight and four (she moved with them and her entrepreneur husband to the Dorset coast after the pandemic). But when she became a mother — while working in financial marketing for City firms, and living in Clapham, south London — the shock was brutal. “I went to all the right classes but I was completely clueless about what would happen to me.”
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She later realised she went into it with expectations that were nailing her to a cross constructed partly of her mother’s example: the beautiful yet traditional Instagram “trad wives”; and the “martyr mother” ideals of most western history. In short: open a vein for your child uncomplainingly.
“When I eventually wrote down the expectations I had, it was unbelievable. I was like, ‘Help, I’ve been inhabited by a 1950s housewife.’ It was fascinating because that isn’t actually how I wanted my motherhood to be.”
The reality, by contrast, was a baby who never slept for more than 40 minutes, day or night, and Blaskey, physically depleted in every way and finding breastfeeding “agony”, stressed to desperation by her baby’s crying.
This, while living in the near-isolation that is the modern norm (a survey of young mothers in 2018 by the British Red Cross found that nearly half felt lonely often or always). No class or guide had addressed this.
It was taboo to admit she was struggling, faced with the “enjoy every minute!” or “you chose this!” brigade and the insinuation that those who were unhappy served or deserved their child less. It is mothers now, not children, whom society prefers seen and not heard.
“We live in quite an emotionally immature society, we like to make things binary, good or bad,” Blaskey says. “When mothers have been brave enough to say, ‘This is really hard’, they’ve often been met with, ‘But it’s a blessing to have children’. We self-censor because most of us adore our children more than anything in the world and would never, ever want them or anyone around us to think that that isn’t the case,” Blaskey says. “When we can separate the love that we have for our children and the institution or job of motherhood, then we can have the confidence to speak more freely. We’re not there yet.”
So Blaskey suffered in silence, “stuck in cycles of guilt and wondering just how damaged my daughter is going to be from having a broken mother”, as she writes in Motherkind. The only succour on offer was greetings cards and internet memes advocating numbing the pain with alcohol (“Mummy’s juice!”), or parenting books that were entirely about the baby, or only about her to the extent that she must have been doing it wrong.
She found relief, while trudging with the buggy, in listening to podcasts. She assembled, through them and hundreds of books, research about the changes in psychology and physiology of women post-childbirth.
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A year or two in, by now informally coaching every glassy-eyed new mother on the block, she came up with the “insane idea” of starting a podcast. She bought a £30 microphone from Currys and, having taught herself to use it during the broken nights, asked the authors who had helped her if she could interview them.
The podcast “caught fire” on mothers’ WhatsApp groups, and Blaskey has now made more than 500 episodes, never missing a single Thursday to upload since. “I was angry, if I’m honest, about how content was positioned to mothers.”
One of the breakthrough moments for Blaskey was discovering the term “matrescence”, lately also popularised by the British science writer Lucy Jones who wrote a book of the same name and has been interviewed on Blaskey’s podcast.
In the past decade discoveries have been made on changes to the maternal brain, pheromones and even the role of the cells of your child that remain inside the mother’s body, sometimes for decades after pregnancy.
This is called “foetal microchimerism”, and researchers have hypothesised that these foetal cells may transit into and remain inside a mother to assist with healing. Some research studies find foetal cells concentrated at the site of the mother’s wounds or tumours. Blaskey had two miscarriages and found herself profoundly comforted “from knowing that the cells of my four babies may live on in me”.
Becoming a “chimera” is also a perfect metaphor for the psychological shift a mother undergoes. “The parallel with adolescence is powerful,” she says, “a time when your brain, your body, your identity, your values, your friendships change. You are meant to be questioning everything.”
“This is where the ‘bounce-back’ message for mothers becomes so toxic. It used to be physical — ‘you’ll bounce back into your old jeans’ — but now it also means that you’ll slip back into your work, friendships, your old life as if nothing has happened. That’s impossible and it really damages mothers to make them try.
“If a teenager came to you and said, ‘I’m struggling with my new identity’, we would never say, ‘Oh, don’t worry you’ll get your 11-year-old childhood self back.’ But that’s what we say to mothers, and it’s gaslighting because that self can’t come back.”
Her book acknowledges that much of our cultural set-up is beyond any individual’s control or, as one of her podcast guests put it, motherhood is “feminism’s dirty little secret”. She works for the “mothers who need help right now”.
The book offers that in the form of a discussion of the science of the stress response to infant crying, how “perfectionist, self-critical” drives are a function of how much women care and how normal it is for mothers to have intrusive thoughts about accidentally dropping a child or similar.
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The concept of “this work-life balance thing is complete rubbish”, she says. In particular, Blaskey interrogates the common phrase “mum guilt”. Usually, guilt denotes wrongdoing, but when we add the prefix “mum” to make “mum guilt”, the word is misapplied.
“Mum guilt” is the result of a woman making a rational choice in response to a conflict in the use of her time. “You have done nothing wrong,” Blaskey says. Often, she adds, her coaching clients or listeners say just hearing Blaskey absolve them of “mum guilt” gives instant relief.
When a baby is born, so is a mother, yet there are no “congratulations on your matrescence!” greeting cards as yet. Is it a coincidence that the birth rate is falling at a time when motherhood is so associated with, as the subtitle of Motherkind puts it, “endless expectations”?
“I don’t know,” she says. But if ideas of matrescence reach far and wide — and Blaskey’s ambition is for a TV programme along the lines of Davina McCall’s documentaries on the menopause — the effect would be “quite radical”.
“My hope is that someone who was worried about having children could read this book and think, ‘Do you know what? I might be all right.’” Motherkind by Zoe Blaskey (HarperCollins £16.99). To order go to timesbookshop.co.uk or call 020 3176 2935. Free UK standard P&P on online orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members.