Matrescence abroad: navigating motherhood without a village
This is a slightly more personal post than usual…
I was introduced to the term matrescence toward the end of my pregnancy, and as a new mother abroad, I found it really validating. Since then, I've spoken with other mothers about it too, and I now want to share what I’ve learned along the way. I hope it helps you feel a little less alone on your own motherhood journey, or simply gives some language to some of the feelings and challenges you might be experiencing.
What is matrescence?
The term matrescence was coined by the medical anthropologist Dana Raphael in the 1970s to describe the process of becoming a mother. She likened matrescence to adolescence, in that it is a developmental phase characterised by “disorientation” and “reorientation”. By this she means that multiple areas of ourselves and our lives are turned upside down, including:
physical (changes in our body structure and appearance, hormonal fluctuations)
psychological (changes identity, personality, coping mechanisms, self-esteem)
social (changes in social and professional status, revaluation of relationships)
spiritual (existential questions, (re)discovering faith and spirituality)
During matrescence, these parts of ourselves get shaken up, which can be a jarring and overwhelming experience. Like a snow globe, it takes time for things to settle, and when they do, the image looks different than it did before.
The expat layer to matrescence
Matrescence is already a period of profound change. Living abroad can amplify that process, because the relational, cultural, and practical structures that usually support new mothers are often missing or unfamiliar.
Another challenge is that matrescence and migration both bring about shifts in our sense of identity. Most expats have already experienced leaving familiar roles behind, losing a sense of competence, and having to rebuild community. Then motherhood arrives and asks us to do it all again.
While this post focuses on mothers, in large part because matrescence doesn’t receive enough attention, many of the challenges outlined below also apply to expat fathers.
Challenges
1. Navigating unfamiliar systems
Pregnancy and postpartum are periods of heightened vulnerability and yet it's a time that introduces many new demands, particularly for expat mothers. The cognitive and emotional load of booking antenatal appointments with language barriers, or learning to navigate an unfamiliar healthcare system, adds more stress and exhaustion. Even when your language skills are good and you’ve been in the country for years, the vocabulary of pregnancy and birth is its own dialect and it can be difficult to express your needs and advocate for yourself.
2. Conflicting messages and cultural scripts about motherhood
Most cultures have their own beliefs about what it means to be a “good mother”. However, when you live abroad you may find yourself receiving conflicting messages about what you "should" be doing. For example, your country of origin might advocate staying at home with the baby for as long as possible, while your host country encourages you to return to work within a couple of months. Or it might be about how long you should breastfeed, or which foods are safe during pregnancy… and the list goes on. The dissonance between these cultural messages can add to the self-doubt and guilt which many mothers-to-be and new mothers already carry.
3. The noise-to-support imbalance
Living abroad means that there is often an imbalance between the advice you receive from friends and family back home and the presence they can offer. You can find yourself with an abundance of opinions (often unhelpful) but with very little hands-on support, like someone to hold your baby while you take a shower, bring over some food or simply hug you after a difficult day.
4. Grieving what’s out of reach
Moving abroad comes with its own losses. Even when you chose to move, and even when you love your life abroad, you can still mourn what isn’t available in the way you'd hoped - whether that's your parents seeing your child regularly, or the cultural traditions you grew up with. Often this grief is dismissed when people say, “but you chose to move” or “ you wanted to raise a family here”. These things can be true and you can still mourn what isn't there.
5. Raising a child between cultures
Motherhood can shine a new light on our cultural identity and what parts of our cultural background we want to pass on to our children. This often involves exploring questions like what traditions you want to keep and what language(s) you want to speak. These questions, and putting them into practice, ask for attention, energy and effort, which are often scarce resources when you have young children.
Building your village
Everyone knows the saying “it takes a village to raise a child” - so what do you do when you don’t have one? For expat mothers, a support network needs to be built rather than inherited. This might come from local pregnancy groups, expat communities, online support groups, mother-and-baby classes, and so on. It takes research and effort, but it can often be very rewarding when you find like-minded people who are in a similar boat. And there can be something freeing in that: getting to choose your village, rather than simply inheriting one.
Lastly, as a therapist, I want to remind you that the therapeutic relationship can also be a part of your village. A place where you and your experience of matrescence can be witnessed and supported, rather than judged or solved.
A note to close
If there’s one thing I hope you take away from this, is that you're not failing at something that everyone else finds easy. Quite the opposite: you’re doing one of the hardest versions of an already hard thing.
So wherever you are in this process, I hope this post offers you a little of what first drew me to the word matrescence: the feeling of being seen and not alone.
Resources
Book - Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood by Lucy Jones
Raphael, D. (1975). Matrescence, becoming a mother, a “new/old” rite de passage. Being female: Reproduction, power, and change.