SPECIAL EDITION: The end of matrescence

“I do miss a baby now and then."

To mark Mother’s Day, I’m resharing an essay I wrote last year about letting go of my idea of myself as a woman who was “becoming” a mother. Although it’s not directly tied to the topic of estrangement, I discuss what it’s like to be inside a decision that the world seems to find it easy to judge from the outside. This is a theme I’ve also been exploring as it relates to choosing familial estrangement.

Enjoy the essay, and warm, lovely thoughts to you, no matter how you celebrate or don’t celebrate this holiday.

When the younger of my two children turned six last October, a pain seized me. Like with every other sudden pain I’ve ever had—emotional, physical, or somewhere in between—I ignored it. But it didn’t go away. So, I started to write about it. 

“I do miss a baby now and then,” I wrote.

As I kept writing, a word came to mind: “matrescence.” It’s not a hugely well-known word, but it had a moment in 2017, right when I happened to be pregnant. It basically means “the process of becoming a mother,” (kind of the way adolescence means “the process of becoming an adult.”) Like adolescence,  matrescence encompasses the physical changes and  also the—shift? volcanic eruption?—in identity. And, I realized that adolescence is a stage of life, which means that adolescence has an end. But what about matrescence? Does it end, too? 

Here’s more of what I jotted down: 

“I’d be ready for another baby now except for the whole everything. LOL. The stress of it all. … Life would be on a different trajectory if I had a 9-year-old, a 6-year-old, and a baby. I’d be sacrificing basically 10 more years, in a way. So I’m at peace with the decision I’ve made. … Still, one hates to just be DONE with any portion of life.”

Would I be sacrificing my life by having a third baby, or wouldn’t I? Like everything else parenting touches, multiple things are true at the same time and some of those things contradict one another. 

I’d be sacrificing my body, no doubt. It took me five years to rehab from the pain and pelvic dysfunction I experienced during my second pregnancy and delivery in 2017. I’d be sacrificing several more years of sleep and both the ability and possibility to concentrate as well. I’d be sacrificing literal years of rest. (I’m recalling the years of weekends that were nothing more than a listless shuffle from part-day carework to full-day.) My kids, now at nine and six years old, still claim a lot of my energy, but we can all sit on the couch and watch a movie together. It’s awesome. 

So in a way, I’d be sacrificing the time and energy I’ve reclaimed now that my kids are more independent. In another way, though, by choosing my end of matrescence now, I’m sacrificing something, too.

Each of my children remade me. We co-created me as we co-created each of them. I have become new, again and again, in the wake of rearing them, and so have they. What could I co-create with a third child? I will never find out. 

And I know, it’s a choice. I live in a position of privilege: I got to decide whether and when to make new people, and now, I’m getting to decide when to stop. I became pregnant more or less when I wanted; I’ve been pregnant twice, and I’ve had two live births. And when I decided I wanted to stop getting pregnant, my spouse, my community, and the world (in general, for now) all agree it’s my decision to make. Because I’m coming from a place of these privileges, it took me a while to admit to myself that I am still allowed to be sad. It’s over. It’s all over! No more babies. 

As I wrote to myself,

“Even if we had another child, in a few years, I'd be facing this again. The stage ends, whether you have one kid or 10. You move on from it. So if I had a baby now, in six years, I'd be facing the same thing, only I'd be 48.”

But the pain I feel is not just because it’s ending. It’s that, because our society is built for men, this ending is invisible. My friend, the artist and ceremonialist Georgia Wall, called it “the unnoticed ending when a door closes but it seems only you hear the latch catch.” But me being me, I can’t let it close unnoticed. I’m here to mark it; at least I’m gonna tell the story of  hearing the “latch catch.” 

The door has closed, for one thing, on me raising a girl into womanhood. I hate how “basic” I’m being in regretting not getting to raise a girl, and of course having a child assigned female at birth is no guarantee that one will raise a girl. But when people ask (even now, occasionally) if we will “try again for a girl,” I think it’s a rude question, but not a stupid one. Of course I would like to experience the parenting of a girl child, to have the chance to warn and marvel at another woman whom I have borne into a world “codified in terms of male needs,” as Elena Ferrante has put it. 

The door has also closed on a life phase marked by incredible growth in my skills, also dismissed or invisible in the larger society. I am proud of the complex, intricate systems I built on the fly: the perfect combination of feeding/changing/swaddling/room darkening/white-noise volume/positioning of the crib to maximize their chances at a good nap is just one of hundreds of examples. I’d put my aptitude for innovation up against any tech bro’s, any day of the week.

But the time decay on these new abilities is relentless: they only work for one baby, at one particular stage of their lives that lasts maybe a month or two. I have built these internal encyclopedias on one little alien, watched them become obsolete before the ink was dry, and written and rewritten them continually. Well, that work is not over, but it’s slowed down. My children don’t need me like that anymore. The door has closed on me being the authority on them. That’s as it should be. I’m both grateful and sad.

I discussed this feeling with a friend.  She sent me back a voice message: “Funny that you said that because when I was walking through Target aisles, I crossed over through the baby section, and I just kind of stood there, taking in the baby items: the adorable tiny onesies, the socks, the formula, even, and I just sighed and kept moving. … That’s not particularly meaningful or deep, but I was like, ‘You know, I will never need to buy anything from this section again.’” 

Actually, I did find it particularly meaningful and deep, and familiar, too. So much of contemporary American motherhood occurs in isolation like this. Each of us on paths that we forge alone, standing still in a halogen-bright Target, a nod, a sigh, a series of doors closing with no one else to hear the latch catch. Keeping it moving.

In our society, we are so busy reviling aging that we can’t fathom making room for a woman's ambivalent feelings about the wisdom that comes with the end.¹

Anyway, so what? So, maybe the world doesn’t make room for these moments, but I am. If I don’t, I’ll get bitter. “All that work and what did it get me?” We must find ways to celebrate ourselves and each other in a world where everything—including celebration and memorial—is built for men. That’s why one night in January, a couple of days after my 43rd birthday, with my friend Georgia’s help, I went to the park and held a matrescence graduation for myself. 

There I am. From matrescence to… I don’t know what yet. But in releasing this stage, I hope I’m making room for the next. 

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That’s all for this week. If you enjoyed that, upgrade to paid to support my work. And tell you friends! I have some really excellent book recommendations I need to tell you about, so I’ll be sharing those soon. Until then!

- Maggie

1. I wonder whether the explosion in interest in perimenopause over the past few years has some root in this unnamed stew of feelings about the door closing, the latch catching, and no one else hearing it. (This is in no way meant to deny the uncomfortable and sometimes debilitating physical symptoms of perimenopause itself.)