Parenthood as a transition: who am I now that I am a mother or a father?

Everyone told you how to look after a baby. Nobody told you what would happen to you. That one afternoon you would be standing in the middle of the kitchen with a child on your hip, wondering where the woman went who only last year read books, walked in the mountains and had opinions about things. Or that, as a father, you would sit in the car outside the building and need five minutes of silence before stepping into a life you do not quite recognise.

We talk about the birth of a child as an event. In truth it is one of the greatest developmental transitions of adulthood — comparable to adolescence in the depth of its upheaval, except that for this one we have neither the words nor the leniency we do at least grant teenagers.

In this post I want to show you what actually happens in the transition to parenthood: why the birth of a parent has a name of its own, why identity has to be reassembled, what research says about a couple becoming a threesome, and why grieving your old life and loving your child are allowed to exist at the same time. And — when it is time for a couple or an individual to look for support.

Matrescence: the birth of a parent has a name of its own

Back in 1973 the anthropologist Dana Raphael coined the word matrescence — the birthing of a mother. The echo of adolescence is deliberate: this too is a developmental period in which body, hormones, identity, relationships and place in the world all change at once. In recent years the clinical psychologist Aurélie Athan of Columbia University has brought the term back into professional and public use precisely because it turned out how healing the naming alone can be: if you know you are in a developmental phase, you no longer read your own confusion as a personal failure.

That this is not a metaphor is confirmed by neuroscience too: in 2017 Elseline Hoekzema and colleagues published a study in Nature Neuroscience showing that pregnancy reshapes the brain markedly and durably — the changes in regions linked to social understanding were so consistent that it was possible to tell from the scans which woman had been pregnant. The brain, in other words, literally restructures itself for a new task. A similar, though less researched, process takes place in fathers — some call it patrescence: in involved fathers too, studies measure hormonal changes and adaptations in the brain networks for caregiving.

The message of both: if you do not recognise yourself after the birth of your child, you are not falling apart. You are restructuring.

Who am I besides a mother, besides a father?

In this transition the identity shock is often stronger than the sleeplessness and the nappies. The roles you used to assemble yourself from — professional, friend, partner, athlete, daughter — are squeezed into a corner overnight, and the centre is taken by one alone: mother. Or father. And because at the start this role is total (a baby knows no timetable), the feeling soon creeps in that all the other layers have vanished for good.

They have not vanished — but they are in an in-between space, as every identity is in the middle of a big transition. The old self no longer holds in full, the new one is not yet assembled. This process takes months and years, not weeks, and it moves at its own rhythm: first survival, then the first returns to yourself (an hour of sport, coffee with a friend, an evening without the child), and gradually a new whole in which parenthood is an important layer — but not the only one.

In the therapy room, during this transition, I often hear a question spoken quietly: “Am I a bad mother because I miss my old life?” The answer is no. Missing it is not a betrayal. It is grief — and grief is a healthy response to a real loss: the loss of freedom, of spontaneity, of the body as it was, of the two of you as you were. Love for your child and sadness for your old life do not cancel each other out; in most parents they live side by side in the same chest. And if that sadness comes with a voice that reproaches you for every thought about yourself, read the post on maternal guilt — there I set out where it comes from and why it lies.

Fathers: the transition nobody asks them about

Matrescence is slowly starting to be talked about; patrescence — the birthing of a father — hardly at all. And yet research shows that fatherhood is not merely a social role but a biological and psychological transition too: in involved fathers, hormone levels change (testosterone drops, among other things, which researchers read as the organism switching from competing to caring), and Eyal Abraham and colleagues (2014) showed that the paternal brain adapts in proportion to how much caregiving the father actually does — it is caregiving, then, that literally shapes the brain, not sex.

A father’s transition has its own particular traps, though. The first is invisibility: people ask after the mother and the baby, the father is logistics. The second is exclusion: in the first months many a father feels like an assistant in somebody else’s story — mother and baby are a symbiotic unit and he waits outside the door. The third is silence: men speak about the distress of fatherhood even more rarely than women do about the distress of motherhood, because “it isn’t his place to find it hard”. The result is that a father’s distress likes to dress itself up as working into the night, retreating into a phone, or irritability.

If you are a father reading this: your transition is real, your confusion is legitimate, and your place in the front row does not happen by itself — it is taken, through caregiving, through nights, through time on the floor beside your child. And if you are a mother: the surest way to keep the father’s role large is to let him do it his way — even when the nappy is not fastened the way you would fasten it.

A couple becomes a threesome: what the research shows

Now to the subject nobody raises when visiting the cot: what the birth of a child does to a couple. Here the research is uncomfortably unanimous. In an eight-year longitudinal study, Brian Doss and colleagues (2009) showed that in most couples satisfaction with the partnership drops suddenly and lastingly after the birth of a first child — considerably more steeply than in couples without children, where satisfaction declines slowly and gradually. Shapiro, Gottman and Carrère (2000) found something similar: in the first years after a child is born, marital satisfaction drops for roughly two thirds of women. And the Cowans, who researched the transition to parenthood for decades, showed that conflict between partners as a rule increases after the birth.

Why are these figures a reason for relief rather than despair? Because they tell you: the drop is normal. It is not proof that you chose each other badly or that your love has faded — it is the statistically expected consequence of two exhausted people becoming, overnight, a logistics centre operating around the clock. Less sleep, less time as a couple, more decisions, more points of friction (division of labour, parenting, money, grandparents) — it would be odd if the relationship did not feel it.

More important still is what the research says about the differences between couples: those who adjust best to the transition are the ones who were already tending their friendship and affection, who know how to soften a conflict, and who talk about changes before they turn into resentments. In other words — the fate of a relationship after a child lies not in whether the drop comes, but in what the couple does with it.

The conversations couples don’t have

With couples in this transition the same pattern shows up again and again: they argue about the concrete (who gets up at night, who last folded the laundry), and beneath the concrete lie the unspoken themes. A few conversations worth having — preferably more than once:

• Invisible work. Who carries the list in their head — vaccinations, clothing sizes, presents, appointments? That mental load is work, even if it cannot be seen. Until it is named and divided, one person as a rule carries it and quietly burns out.
• Standards. “I’m helping you” is not the same as “we are equal parents”. A conversation about what a fair division means to each of you — not by the patterns of the families you come from, but by your own judgement.
• Each with your own reservoir. What fills each of you up, and how much of it are you getting at the moment? An hour to yourself is not a reward to be earned — it is the maintenance of the person your child needs in working order.
• The two of you. When did we last talk about something other than the child and the logistics? Fifteen minutes a day of conversation that is not operations is, in Gottman’s experience, one of the cheapest protective factors a relationship has.
• Intimacy. The body after birth, exhaustion, changed desire — subjects that without words harden into resentment or shame, and with words become solvable.

If these conversations keep getting stuck — if they end in defensiveness, withdrawal or the same circle of reproaches — that is not a sign that you are a bad couple. It is a sign that you need better tools, and that is exactly what couples therapy is for. When it is time for it and what it looks like, I described in the post When to go to couples therapy.

Where the line is: baby blues, exhaustion, postnatal distress

There is one thing I must mark out honestly, though. Everything I have described — the confusion, the grieving, the swings, the drop in couple satisfaction — is a normal part of the transition. But there is also distress that goes beyond the transition: if low mood, anxiety, numbness or intrusive thoughts persist and deepen, if you cannot feel joy at anything, if thoughts appear that you or your child should not exist — then this is no longer matrescence but postnatal mental distress, and it needs professional treatment.

Postnatal depression and related disorders are beyond the scope of this post and beyond the scope of my work: if you recognise yourself in the paragraph above, please turn as soon as you can to your GP, your gynaecologist or your community nurse — these are the doors to effective help, which does exist and does work. Seeking help in this case is not an overreaction; it is the most parental act there is.

Support in the transition: for yourself, for the couple

And where am I in this story? In the transition to parenthood I do two things. With individuals — mothers and fathers — I open a space for what is not allowed to be said aloud beside the cot: grief, doubt, anger, the question of who I am now. That is part of my service of support through life transitions. With couples I work on making sure the drop the statistics predict does not become a chasm: that the unspoken themes get words, that the sharing of burdens gets an agreement, and that the two of you get your fifteen minutes back.

If you feel — or the two of you feel — that such a space would be useful, you can write to me. And if you take a single thought away from this post, let it be this: finding it hard is not a betrayal of your child. The birth of a parent is a transition, not an exam — and nobody comes through it without a scratch.