In my small country, it is only recently that March the 8th is considered more of a International Women’s Day rather than a Mother’s Day.
On this 8th of March, as I was unintentionally reading the book Matrescence by Lucy Jones, I found a reflection of me as a mom, of my very own transformation, a journey we don’t speak that often, yet we deeply feel. It made me wonder, if I had learned about becoming a mother the way I learned about adolescence, would I have been better prepared?
Would I have known that the body, the mind, and the heart do not transition into motherhood overnight, but more through reshaping and rebuilding oneself, a breaking and mending, a journey of leaving behind an old self and discovering a new one?
I remember I had told everyone as I was leaving the hospital that it felt like I was returning from emigration. Everything seemed familiar, the neighborhood. the city, but something had shifted. I couldn’t realize at the time that it wasn’t the surroundings; it was the very outskirts of who I am. The profound internal shift, the feeling of returning to a place that’s familiar but also fundamentally changed.
This book made me feel that I was not alone and that indeed just like me all the women becoming mothers were finding their new selves too.
We talk about puberty in our households and school, the sudden rush of hormones, the physical transformations, the emotional tsunamis. But no one really tells us that motherhood, too, is a metamorphosis. A woman does not simply become a mother, she becomes someone new. And yet, in the middle of this transformation, she is expected to carry on, as if nothing inside her has shifted, as if the ground beneath her had never shaken. She becomes a butterfly, but yet the worm inside her torments her all the time.
If Matrescence was something we would hear a little more, perhaps we would have known that empowerment does not always come in the form of resilience and strength but also in the courage to admit that we are fragile and vulnerable. That we are confused, tired and sleepless and a wreck! That strength is not measured by how quickly we return to our former selves, but by how bravely we embrace the unfamiliar world of our new existence.
We all have been told about postpartum depression in whispers, as if it was an anomaly, something they wish we don’t experience, rather than understand. But what if we had been taught that it is not weakness, but a profound rebounding with selfhood? That sometimes is not just about loving a child, but about learning to love the woman we are becoming.
Becoming a mother is not just an experience, it is a revolution. And the more we speak of it, the more we give women the power to shape it, to claim it, to demand that it be recognized.
Just as an emigrant returns to a familiar home but finds the surroundings forever changed, motherhood has redefined the shape of myself. The place I once knew has shifted, and there is me in between learning to embrace the new me. Sometimes unbothered, sometimes full of mom guilt but yet forever in motion, forever evolving as a woman.
Erina Rrahmani
Project Manager at The Balkan Forum
