When a woman becomes a mother, she becomes a completely different person in many ways – physically, emotionally and socially. This phase of becoming a mother is known as matrescence.
The term was coined in the 1970s by American medical anthropologist Dana Louise Raphael, who described it as “the time of mother-becoming”.
To put it simply, when a baby is born, a mother is born too. And while support is usually at hand in terms of looking after a child, women tend to be left to their own devices to deal with this big life change.
