No one told me that I would grieve myself after becoming a mother. That there would be days when I looked in the mirror and genuinely couldn’t recognise the person looking back — not because I was broken, but because I was being profoundly remade. Matrescence — the developmental process of becoming a mother — is one of the most significant identity shifts a human being can undergo. Yet our culture treats it as invisible. (NIH, Matrescence Research, 2017)
What Actually Happens to Your Identity
Research shows that becoming a mother triggers significant structural changes in the brain — changes that persist for at least two years. Grey matter volume shifts. Emotional sensitivity increases. Social priorities reorganise entirely. This is not sentiment — it is neuroscience. You are genuinely not the same person you were before. (Nature Neuroscience, 2016)
And while this transformation can be beautiful, it is also, frequently, destabilising. Parts of your former identity — your career identity, your sexual identity, your social identity, your sense of creative self — can feel suddenly inaccessible.
7 Ways to Reclaim Your Sense of Self
1. Name What You’ve Lost
You cannot integrate what you haven’t acknowledged. Make a list of the parts of your pre-motherhood identity that feel gone or diminished. Name them. Grieve them genuinely. This is not ingratitude — it is the necessary first step of integration.
2. Protect Time That Is Yours
Even an hour a week of time that belongs entirely to you — not to productivity, not to caregiving — is protective of identity. What did you love before? Reading. Creating. Exercising. Moving your body without purpose. Protect that time fiercely, even imperfectly.
3. Resist the Total Merger
A child who grows up as their parent’s entire world inherits that weight. Maintaining your own identity — your interests, your friendships, your ambitions — is not selfish. It is modeling what a full life looks like. It is one of the most powerful things you can give your child.
4. Talk to Other Mothers Honestly
The performance of perfect, joyful motherhood is exhausting and isolating. Find at least one person you can be honest with about the ambivalence, the frustration, the grief. You will almost certainly find you are not alone.
5. Seek Therapy If You Need It
Identity disruption in motherhood is real and can be clinically significant. Therapy — particularly approaches that focus on identity integration — can be genuinely transformative. There is no shame in needing support for one of life’s most profound transitions. (NHS, Talking Therapies)
Final Thought
You are not disappearing. You are becoming. The woman emerging from this transformation will contain everything she was before — and more. Matrescence is not the end of your story. It is one of the most complex, courageous chapters you will ever live through.
Love Rubie xoxo
Rubie Le’Faine is the founder of Rubie Rubie and a writer specialising in emotional well-being, self-identity, and the psychology of modern relationships. She holds a Level 3 Certificate in Counselling Skills and has spent over eight years studying attachment theory, cognitive behavioural principles, and human development — first through formal study, then through lived experience that no course can replicate. After navigating a significant relationship breakdown, an identity rebuild, and the complex terrain of rediscovering herself in her 30s, Rubie began writing to make sense of what she had learned and to offer honest, human guidance to others going through the same. She founded Rubie Rubie in 2022 as a space for women seeking real answers, not platitudes. Based in Surrey, UK, her writing is grounded in research, shaped by experience, and centred entirely on the reader’s genuine wellbeing.
