145. How to Make Peace With How Motherhood Changes You

Becoming a mother doesn't just change your life — it permanently enhances your brain, expands your identity, and reshapes the way you move through the world. In this tender Mother's Day episode, I walk through the concept of matrescence — the profound developmental passage every woman undergoes when she becomes a mother — including the fascinating neuroscience behind how pregnancy literally rewires the maternal brain for deeper attunement and connection. We talk honestly about why Mother's Day can hold more than one feeling at once, why the pressure to bounce back is a cultural myth worth releasing, and what it looks like to meet yourself with genuine compassion right in the middle of the transformation you are still living. This one isn't a teaching episode. It's a conversation — and I hope it leaves you feeling something true about who you are and what you're carrying.

If you'd like to get the show notes for this episode, head to:

 https://leighgermann.com

Transcript

Becoming a mother doesn't just change your life. Science shows it permanently enhances your brain, deepens your sense of self, and expands the way you move through the world. This week on Leadership Parenting, we're talking about what that transformation actually is, why it matters, and how to meet yourself with compassion right in the middle of it. This is Leadership Parenting, How to Make Peace With How Motherhood Changes You.

Did you know that resilience is the key to confidence and joy? As moms, it's what we want for our kids, but it's also what we need for ourselves. My name is Leigh Germann. I'm a therapist and I'm a mom. Join me as we explore the skills you need to know to be confident and joyful. Then get ready to teach these skills to your kids. This is Leadership Parenting, where you learn how to lead your family by showing them the way.

Hi friends, welcome back to Leadership Parenting. This is Mother's Day week. If you're listening to this the way I imagine you are, maybe in your car during a walk or with headphones in while the kids are doing something in the next room, I want you to know that I see you not just as a mother, but as a person who's carrying something incredibly complex and incredibly important every single day.

Mother's Day is one of those occasions that lands a little differently for different people. Do you ever notice how the week leading up to it can bring up some feelings, maybe that you expected or maybe that you didn't expect? Maybe there's warmth and sweetness, something you're really looking forward to. Maybe there's a little bit of grief for a relationship with your mom, or maybe it's been complicated or painful, or maybe with your relationship with yourself, a version of yourself as a mom that you're working on, or that feeling like maybe you're a little lost somewhere in the years of raising children. I don't think there's a right way that anybody is supposed to be experiencing Mother's Day. But one thing I do know is that everyone tends to have their own set of feelings about that. And I think that complexity is one of the most honest things about motherhood. It just translates right into how we mother. Motherhood has always been more than just one thing at a time. It always has.

So today I want to give less of a step-by-step teaching and more kind of a conversation around being a mom. Hopefully one that helps you feel something true and something steadying about who you are, what you're doing, and why it's worth treating yourself with so much care as you're doing it.

I was working with a mom not long ago who came in around this time of year and she sat down and said something that I've heard from different moms over the years in different forms. She said, I love my children more than anything in the world. And I also feel like I've kind of lost myself somewhere in all of that. And I wonder sometimes if I'm even doing a good job. I don't know what to do with all of these failings. Am I allowed to feel all of this at once?

I think what she was describing is that strange coexistence of love, of loss, of fullness, of grief, of being exactly where you're supposed to be, and somehow not quite knowing where that is and who you are supposed to be anymore. And all of that has a name. It's not a failure, it's not depression, though that can be part of it sometimes for women, or anxiety, right? We all get those emotions at times. But this complex set of feelings about being a mom, I think one grand name for it is matrescence.

Have you ever heard that phrase before? That term was first used by an anthropologist named Dana Raphael in the 1970s. She was studying the experience of new mothers, especially around breastfeeding, and she needed a word for what she was seeing because what she was witnessing in women was not just a lifestyle change or an adjustment period or sleep deprivation catching up with someone. It was a developmental passage, something that seemed to be pretty consistent among all the mothers that she was watching and studying. A transformation of identity as significant as adolescence, hormonal as well as neurological. In matrescence, the chemistry of a woman's body shifts alongside the structure of her brain, affecting her mood, her energy, her emotional life in ways that are very real and actually very measurable, which was fascinating, and definitely not a sign that something had gone wrong, but rather a sign that something was going very right.

Think about that for a minute. We understand adolescents. We know that teenagers are going through something. Their brains are rewiring, their sense of self is kind of in flux. They're asking enormous questions about who they are and where they fit. And we hopefully, the goal is that we give adolescents a lot of grace for being difficult and uncertain and emotionally complex during this time because we understand that they're in the middle of becoming something new. They're at a stage of growth.

Well, what Raphael argues and what more recent researchers have built on significantly is that mothers go through something equally profound, and yet we never talk about it. We don't name it, we don't give it the same understanding. Instead, I think we quietly expect women to have babies and then just continue, pick up where they left off, feel grateful, feel ready. And culture hands us the idea that we should bounce back, back to our bodies, back to our productivity, back to ourselves as we were before, as if nothing happened, as if maybe that small event in our life, which is actually a huge event of having a child, that it might could be seen as an interruption rather than a step in a transformation to a whole new part of who we are.

Psychiatrist Alexandra Sacks brought this concept back into wider conversation more recently, because she writes about matrescence in ways that now I think mothers are starting to hear about and they can kind of resonate with. She describes it as a period of profound psychological change that happens when a woman becomes a mother. Now, this could be a biological mother or an adoptive mother or a stepmother. It's an identity shift that can be a little bit disorienting sometimes, but also very necessary and very often deeply misunderstood, even by the women that are going through it themselves.

And here's where I think it gets interesting, and maybe hopefully freeing. In 2017, a group of neuroscientists published a study that I think every mother on the planet probably deserves to know about. Researchers in Spain scanned the brains of women before they became pregnant, after they gave birth, and again two years later. And what they found was very interesting. Pregnancy produces significant lasting changes in the gray matter of a woman's brain, changes that were still measurable up to two years after giving birth.

Now, before I tell you what I think that means, I want to say what I don't think it means. It does not mean something was lost, like your brain was depleted or diminished. And the researchers themselves were clear that these changes are not a cause for concern. Here's what the research actually points at. The areas of the brain that changed the most were the areas associated with social cognition, the ability to understand what another person is thinking, to read emotional cues, to attune to someone else's inner world. And the more significant the changes, the stronger the mother's attachment to their babies. This work, part of what became known as the Be Mother Project, concluded what was happening, I think, in the maternal brain as a remarkable adaptation to motherhood, not a loss, but a recalibration. The brain was not breaking down. The brain was permanently enhancing itself, pruning toward more precision, more openness in social connection, more finely calibrated for the specific and enormous work of raising human beings.

Your brain changed for your role with your child, not by accident, but by design. And yet we wonder why we feel so different. We wonder why we don't feel like ourselves. We wonder why things we used to not be bothered by now bother us deeply, or why we were more sensitive, or why we can't quite locate the person we used to be in the mirror. Part of the answer is that that person has been permanently enhanced, not just changed, but enhanced. We feel things deeper. We sometimes worry in ways we never worried before. We have more responsibility. We start to have more empathy and understanding. The structure of your brain has widened and the capacity of your inner world has deepened, and the architecture of your identity has expanded around something new and something enormous. The life or lives that a mom is responsible for. Not something that happens without a consequence. We feel it. And it's not something that should happen quietly without our acknowledgement.

Matrescence is real. It's neurological, it's psychological, it's hormonal, it's a developmental passage, not a weakness. And if you're in the middle of it right now, whether you have a newborn or a teenager or a college student, what you're carrying is not a sign that something is wrong with you. It is a sign that something very significant is happening within you. Something that has permanently changed the structure of your brain for the better and the architecture of your identity in a deeper way. We want to understand that, not judge it.

So do you ever catch yourself measuring the distance of who you thought you'd be as a mother and who you actually are on a real Tuesday afternoon? Do you ever feel the weight of love itself? Love that's so big it can kind of be scary, right? Because it means we're carrying fear for all the things we can't control to protect our family. Do you ever wonder quietly who this new person is and where is the person that was there before all of this happened?

That wondering itself is part of matrescence. It's the developmental work of this passage. It doesn't mean that something's wrong. It means you are in the middle of this growth process. I think this is the hugest part of helping women adjust to their roles. And let's be honest, we have a big adjustment in postpartum for sure, hands down, maybe the biggest right there. But our children are changing in stages and ages for years, our entire parenting career. And our change goes right along with it. Our roles change. What our kids need from us changes.

I think it's so important that we have to hold on to something that we can count on. That's why I love the teaching of an Essential Self as our center, that at the core of who we are, underneath the roles, all of those changing things, the responsibilities, the exhaustion, and even the love that we feel, there is something very whole, very valuable, and very wise within us that never disappears. It can get a little covered up, a little covered over sometimes, and sometimes it can feel like it's far away, but it doesn't leave.

Motherhood does not take that from you or me. What it does is ask us to expand around it, to stretch the container of our identity, to include all of this bigger stuff. And that stretching, that expansion can feel from the inside a lot like it's painful, like it's breaking a little bit. But what I want to offer to you is that it isn't. It's part of becoming.

One thing that I'm really grateful for is that I've had years of this process. I'm standing at the end of 30 years of watching my world change with children. And I'll tell you, I'm less afraid of matrescence now that I see the beautiful arc of it. Wherever you are, it can feel so scary that things are changing, that they're different, that you're not enough, that your kids need more, your worries, your concerns, your exhaustion. But I promise you, there will be a day when you're standing down the road and you're seeing that development. You'll be amazed at how your capacity has enlarged, how your heart is enlarged, how your empathy is enlarged. You'll be in awe of the growth you see of your children and grateful that you have been part of that. No matter how much that stretched you and caused you to cry at night and made you feel like you were inadequate. But what I want to say to you is I think that's part of the process. You're in the game. You've got all the feels for everything that's happening. What if that's not a sign that something's wrong? What if that is the tender work of being a mother?

You are a more complex version of yourself, a version that's been asked to hold love and loss and exhaustion and fierce protection and daily, sometimes monotony, but literally ordinary beauty all at the same time. That's not less of who you are. That is more. It's an extraordinary amount to carry. We deserve to be recognized for carrying it.

So as we come into this Mother's Day week, I don't want to send you away with a list of things to practice or work on. Instead, I want to offer you three things I hope you'll simply let yourself receive. Three permissions, three true things you can let just land.

The first is permission to not have it all figured out. Matrescence is a passage, not a problem to solve. You're not behind. You're not missing something that everyone else has. You're in the middle of something that takes time, a real neurological, psychological transformation. The not knowing is part of the passage. You don't have to be further along than you are.

The second is permission to feel all of it. The love and the loss, the pride, the exhaustion, the fullness, the quiet wondering. You don't have to choose one feeling and put the others away. You don't have to resolve the complexity into something tidy or easy to explain. Motherhood holds multitudes, and so do you. Both things can be true at the same time, and both things deserve your care.

The third is permission to be enough as you are today. Not when you're calmer or when you're more consistent or more patient or further down the road. Today, in this imperfect and ordinary version of yourself, you are enough for your children. They do not need anything else. They need you. This real you, the one who loves them and tries every day and always comes back. That mother is more than enough. She's exactly who they need.

I want to come back to the woman I mentioned earlier, the one who sat across from me and said she didn't know if she was allowed to feel all those things at once. What I told her is what I told you. You're not just allowed to feel those things. Feeling all those things is exactly right. It's the honest response to something that contains multitudes.

Motherhood is not a single note, it's a chord. Sometimes the notes are in tension with each other and they hurt our ears. And sometimes they're in harmony, and they're the most beautiful thing you've ever heard. And sometimes we can't even hear anything through the noise of all of our daily, normal, ordinary life. But the chord is still real. It's your music.

And this Mother's Day, I want to offer you this instead of measuring yourself against an ideal you may have held since before you knew what this would actually feel like, I want to invite you to consider acknowledging yourself as enough. You're expanding, you're enhancing, and we're all doing it imperfectly. It's the only way human beings have ever been able to do it.

Happy Mother's Day, friends. I will see you all next week. Take care.

The Leadership Parenting Podcast is for general information purposes only. It is not therapy and should not take the place of meeting with a qualified mental health professional. The information on this podcast is not intended to diagnose or treat any condition, illness, or disease. It's also not intended to be legal, medical, or therapeutic advice. Please consult your doctor or mental health professional for your individual circumstances. Thanks again and take care.