Matrescence: Does becoming a mother change… everything? with Jessie Harrold
The transition into motherhood reshapes not just our roles, but our very beings. In this episode, Gervase Kolmos sits down with Jessie Harrold, author of Mothershift, to explore the transformative journey known as matrescence. Jessie shares her insights on how becoming a mother can be both a radical shift and a rite of passage filled with growth, challenges, and deep self-discovery. Together, they discuss the complexities of identity shifts, societal expectations, and the importance of holding space for both the beauty and the struggle of parenting.
Keep listening as Gervase and Jessie cover the balance between rejecting and emulating our own upbringing, explore how motherhood pushes us to hold paradoxes and embrace nuance, and discuss how it transforms not only how we parent but also how we grow as individuals.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode:
The meaning and transformative power of matrescense
The importance of holding complexity and paradox in motherhood
The need for and challenges of finding community and support in modern motherhood
How your upbringing can leave you swinging between breaking cycles and repeating them
Why self-compassion is a must in the matrescence journey
The value of finding balance and what's right for you in motherhood versus societal norms
Connect with Jessie Harrold
Instagram | @jessie.es.harrold:
Website | https://www.jessieharrold.com/
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Matrescence: Does becoming a mother change… everything? with Jessie Harrold
Episode Full Transcript
Gervase: All right, loves, welcome back to the Modern Phoenix podcast. I am so excited to introduce you to Jessie Harreld. Thank you so much for your time, launching her new book, Mother Shift. Go buy it. It looks beautiful. I’m so excited to have a conversation about your work in the world with matrescence and mothers and your book. Motherhood is just a topic I’m infinitely hungry to learn about, to talk about, to explore from every angle. I heard you on Becca P. Estrelli’s podcast, who is one of my teachers, and I just thought: yes, that is a voice more people need to hear. So thank you so much for your time.
Jessie: Oh, thank you. That’s such a sweet introduction.
Gervase: You’re welcome. Let me just read your bio. Jessie Harreld is a coach and doula who has been supporting women through radical life transformations and other rites of passage for over 15 years. She works one-on-one with women and mothers, facilitates mentorship programs, women’s circles and rituals, and hosts retreats and nature-based experiences. Jessie is the author of Mother Shift: Reclaiming Motherhood as a Rite of Passage and Project Body Love: My Quest to Love My Body and the Surprising Truth I Found Instead. She is also the host of the Becoming podcast. Jessie lives on the east coast of Canada where she mothers her two children, writes, and stewards the land. Beautiful.
So I feel really called today to ask you—I’ve been following your book launch and know you’ve been speaking to so many people about the book. I’d love to open up by asking you: how are you really?
Jessie: Thank you for asking. Well, let’s see. I feel like the book launch process has been a really both-and experience for me. People following along know that I’ve been writing this book, slash trying to get a deal for this book, for five years. It was a really long process. Really, my whole book-writing journey has been ten-plus years of wanting to put a book out into the world. My first book was self-published, and I realized after that that I wanted to experience what it was like to get a traditional publishing deal.
So I’m sitting with this question right now: what happens when a dream comes true? How does it feel? And how do I grapple with the times that it doesn’t feel like a dream come true? Because the reality is when you’re launching a book, it feels like a different kind of work. Day-to-day is still me making Kraft Dinner for my kids and doing more social media than I’m comfortable with. It’s interesting because we have this idea of what happens when a long-held dream comes to fruition, but the truth is: it looks a lot like every other day, especially in a complex life and a complex world. So how I really am is just sitting with all of that—enjoying the highs when they happen, when it really does feel like a cliché dream come true, and being compassionate with myself when it just feels like another rainy November day.
Gervase: Thank you so much for sharing that and being honest. I think it’s profoundly relatable to anybody listening, even if they haven’t launched a book. It reminds me of so many moments in my life and conversations with clients where you have the expectation of the thing and then the thing itself. What I hear in your navigating this is staying curious, which I’ve found so helpful in not attaching to: “I know what will happen when the dream comes true. All my problems will go away, life will be a fairy tale, and nothing will ever be challenging again.”
It’s relatable in every area of life. And weaving that into motherhood, I think about when I first became a mom. I’ve talked about this exhaustively, so I don’t want to be too redundant, but my transition into motherhood the first time was jolting. It was a dream come true, everything I ever wanted, beyond what I expected, and also more shattering and challenging than I had been prepared for. My kids are 11, 8, and 4 now, so I’m in a different season. The dream looks different. I look at my children often and want to be more attuned to the truth that this, too, is another dream come true.
The challenge of motherhood is seeing that everything you wished for is here, if you’re one of the fortunate ones like me—and I don’t want to bypass that for women whose dreams didn’t come true. But when it does, it’s still: how do you stay with it? How do you hold the paradox that so much of it is not a dream? Recently I joked with a friend, I left the doctor’s office and said: “Do you mean to tell me we have walking pneumonia, pinworms, and rhinovirus at the same time?” As the words left my mouth I thought, you couldn’t make this shit up. Nobody would believe it. That’s what my motherhood is like lately.
So I don’t really know where I want to go with that, but I’m curious for you: how has this woven into your motherhood experience and your work with mothers?
Jessie: Yeah. I think what you’re speaking to is complexity—the idea that we can hold two truths at once. Motherhood can be incredibly rewarding, beautiful, dream-come-true-ish, and it can be incredibly challenging and depleting. We live and mother in a culture that is oppressive to mothers in many ways. The meta thing is that motherhood actually allows us, even nudges us, to hold complexity in ways most of our culture can’t. Our culture forces experiences into dichotomies. I catch myself doing it all the time.
But one of the powerful things that can happen in matrescence, our transition into motherhood, is this ability to hold complexity. In adult development psychology, that ability is a hallmark of maturity. We think of our kids’ milestones, but adults have milestones too. We now know we continue to grow and evolve into elder years. One hallmark of maturity is holding paradox. Research—even though it’s biased toward white American male business owners—shows about 70% of people hold a dichotomous worldview. They outsource their knowing, poll the world, and do what’s most socially acceptable.
The evolved stage is the ability to hold paradox, be interconnected, in-source knowing instead of outsourcing. That’s maturity. And I think matrescence, particularly when supported, catapults us into that maturity and evolution. That excites me—it poises us to be change agents in the world.
Gervase: Seventy percent. That fascinates me. I’ve been endlessly curious about what allows a person to hold complexity and nuance and feel safe doing it—to in-source their knowing instead of outside-in. I never thought of it as developmentally appropriate. That’s interesting, because I know older figures in my life who don’t have that and never will.
So—matrescence. Could you define it for us? And then talk about the ways motherhood grows us up and the reasons it might not? Because I feel deeply: wow, something has literally changed in me, I’m holding complexity, but I feel like an alien. Nobody else does. I want to go back to being like everybody else because it’s hard to explain. After defining matrescence, what are the paths—what grows a person up, or holds them back?
Jessie: Matrescence is a term coined in 1975 by social anthropologist Dr. Dana Raphael. She also coined the term doula. She described matrescence as the time of mother-becoming, a massive transformation biologically, psychologically, culturally, spiritually, economically. It impacts the whole ecosystem of our lives. Even that is countercultural, because we’re told motherhood shouldn’t change you—you should bounce back. Saying everything changes is radical.
I posit in my book and work that matrescence takes two to three years to traverse, very different than the six-week postpartum checkup or even the fourth trimester. It’s a change that changes everything.
Everyone who transitions into motherhood—even if not through carrying a baby biologically—goes through matrescence. I’m especially interested in the identity shift: Who am I now that I’m a mother? My mentor used to say: some people become moms (lowercase m). They have a baby. Others are undone and remade into Mothers (capital M).
We have agency, autonomy, and natural propensity. As a naturally introspective seeker, I was here for motherhood to undo me. Others hold strong values around not changing, around bouncing back, and maybe mother is not an identity they want to lead with. There’s nuance and spectrum there. I’m curious about those of us who want to see it as personal and spiritual growth.
Do we always choose growth? Not always. Some of us are dragged by our hair. That was me. Totally. Even though I had a doula talking about matrescence before anyone else, it wasn’t easy. In fact, research shows we can’t fully experience matrescence unless we face challenges. Those moments—like the doctor’s office story—make us.
So what makes the difference? Honestly, that’s the question at the heart of my work. If I had it fully answered, I wouldn’t have a job. Right now, the cultural awareness is growing—matrescence has a hashtag, people are talking about it. But my work is supporting mothers in understanding how it unfolds, not just that it happens. Giving them a map. That’s a big deal in whether or not we hear the call of transformation.
I use rites of passage theory to create that map. It allows us to talk about letting go of our former selves, grieving that self. You can’t do the growth without the grief. It’s necessary to contend with who we are no longer, what we’re stepping away from. There’s ambiguity—maybe your jeans don’t fit, and you don’t know if they’ll ever fit again. Are you grieving something gone or hoping it returns? That’s initiation into complexity.
Rites of passage theory also gives us a way to talk about liminal space—the in-between, the goo. No longer caterpillar, not yet butterfly. No longer not a mother, not yet fully embodied as a mother. It’s discomforting, especially in a culture of capitalism and patriarchy that tells us to be someone, to have goals, to be certain. Grief and liminality are countercultural. We don’t have the skills or the privilege, often, to be there. But it’s important for transformation.
So is matrescence automatic? No. But it’s low-hanging fruit. There’s so much potential if we take the call to be remade.
Gervais: I related to so much of that. My journey into motherhood—I’ve always been countercultural, curious. My goal was to fit in and be a mom (lowercase m). There’s so much fear when you have to give that up—your body, your job, your paycheck, your belonging, your beliefs. The fear drives so much unwillingness to let go. But the fear can be calmed with permission and naming the thing.
I often tell clients: that’s your internalized capitalism. White supremacy tells us this. Second-wave feminism tells us this. Notice the indoctrination. I don’t even mean “smash the patriarchy,” but naming the things that make you afraid to be who you are is settling. It gives safety to step into the goo. It requires trust in the process, trust in yourself, a support system. And yes, privilege.
Without support, how is a new mother supposed to meet her fear? How do you step into initiation without a village, without examples, without embodiment? I tell my clients: nobody’s doing this. Look around, find lighthouses. I hope I can be one for some women—not as a ta-da but as a fellow Phoenix, constantly evolving, constantly back in the goo.
Notice who we look to for strength and resilience. If it’s women performing, keeping it together, being patriarchy’s darlings—check, check, check—what does that do to our psyches and nervous systems? It tells us we don’t have permission. We don’t even have one example. Naming that it’s countercultural helps. Finding a woman who holds complexity—that alone is rare. Those are the voices I seek online.
And why was I so devoted to taking steps into the fire, into the goo? I told my partner: I don’t know what will happen, with career, child care, daily life. I just know I need to be here. I need to be with this. I’ve always been difficult that way. But for women without examples, how do you give them permission and safety to step into the goo?
Jessie: What you’re speaking to is belonging. Any time we ask “Who am I now?” we’re also asking “Where do I belong?” When we change, so does our ecosystem, so do our people. We need community, peers, elders—but it’s also a time of disrupted belonging. That paradox is tough.
In traditional rites of passage, the journey wasn’t complete until you were witnessed—“I see you. You’re different now. Welcome.” Without witnessing, we can traverse matrescence but still feel incomplete. Social media has become a place to be witnessed. It can be a lifeline, but it’s curated. Even raw posts are curated. So where do we get real complexity if we’re mostly in isolation?
You’re right: people crave normal. Normal says you belong. That’s primal. Our ancestors’ lives depended on belonging. So it feels scary to transform and risk stepping outside belonging.
And the fear is compounded by how we talk about postpartum challenges—through the lens of postpartum mood disorders. They’re common and underdiagnosed, but also sometimes overdiagnosed because we don’t have nuance. About 40% of mothers fall into the “worried well”—mothering is hard, and what they’re experiencing is normative. But now when we dance at the edge of grief, anger, ambivalence, we fear falling off the edge into pathology. We avoid grief and liminality. It’s protective, because if culture doesn’t have skills for grief, best avoid it.
This is nuanced. But our idea of normal has become distorted. Without social referencing, without peers to talk with, it’s hard to know if our experience is normal.
Gervase: So many good points. And yes, just a loving reminder to listeners: this is nuanced, not finite. Take what resonates, leave the rest. Be curious about how you experience yourself through matrescence.
I was thinking, with over- and under-diagnosed postpartum disorders, and the fear of being the “depressed mother” or “angry mother”—what I’m seeing is mothers living in fear not just of being depressed but of being like their mothers. The mantra is: I can’t be like my mother. I can’t be angry, depressed, let myself go, not fit into jeans, go back to work, be absent, whatever her mistake was. That narrow focus is dehumanizing. It denies younger mothers their own lived experience. I’m curious if you’ve seen this and how you meet it.
Jessie: Yes. There’s a whole section in my book on this. It’s one of those things nobody tells you will happen: the complexity around your relationship with how you were mothered. Our mothers’ generation mothered under different cultural oppressions. They did their best to survive in a world even less aware of patriarchy, capitalism, etc. That shaped us.
Then in our matrescence, we grapple: what gifts will I pass on, what needs healing? There’s never a time we compare ourselves more to our mothers. Never a time when expectations of our mothers—or of being mothered as we mother—are higher. It’s a lot to contend with.
You’re right: the finger-pointing and pathologizing adds pressure. A new cultural paradigm is “cycle breaking.” Search the hashtag—everyone’s a cycle breaker. And yes, I’m doing it too. But white wellness culture has taken it to an extreme. If you holler at your kid in Walmart, you’re “doing it wrong.” It’s become another tight, narrow, complexity-free zone.
We need compassion for ourselves when we’re not breaking cycles—when we’re perpetuating things, just being human. The hidden work of matrescence is learning to mother ourselves. When we can do that, we can release our mothers, let them be human. They did the best they could. Most weren’t trying to harm anyone. Culture shaped them. Healing the mother wound is freeing them to be human—and freeing ourselves to be human.
Gervase: Yes. And it’s liberating. Second-wave feminism told us we could be it all, do it all. Thank you, feminism. But now I just see women asking: can I just be human, even for a moment? Otherwise it’s pushing, performing, and when you inevitably yell at your kid, it’s shame and blame. Hyper-fixation on fixing, finger-pointing, being perfect. Exhausting, dehumanizing.
I don’t think that’s the assignment. The more conversations I have, the more I wonder: what if just being human is enough? Who made the rules that we have to be perfect? And we’re not even inheriting them from lived experience or elders in circle—it’s from social media, therapists on YouTube. Helpful, but incomplete. We need to bring it into our bodies, our lived experience, and give ourselves grace. Maybe not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Maybe wear jeans sometimes, but selectively. Not all or nothing. Something in the middle.
Jessie: Yes. One of the things I talk about in the book with cycle breaking is that we tend to swing the pendulum: “Not like that,” so we do the exact opposite. That’s also distorted. The real work is finding the middle. Now, 13 years into parenting, I see lots my parents did that was awesome, worth keeping. I also see ways I judged my mother early on—things I swore I’d never do—that I have done, because life. Because human.
There’s beauty in the middle. And ultimately the middle is what’s right for you.
Gervase: A hundred percent. And knowing yourself is how you know you’re there.
Jessie: Totally.
Gervase: Thank you so much for sharing your brilliance and wisdom with us today. I deeply enjoyed this conversation. Before I invite you to share how people can keep in touch and buy your book, I want to acknowledge you. There are not many mothers who feel like elders—not to age you, but who carry lived wisdom. Online or in person, it’s rare. After one hour with you and listening to you elsewhere, that’s how it feels to be in your presence. Thank you for bringing that wisdom, humanity, and complexity.
Jessie: Thank you. That’s so lovely to hear.
Gervase: Everybody, go buy Mother Shift. Tell us where we can get it and how else to support your work.
Jessie: Sure. Mother Shift: Reclaiming Motherhood as a Rite of Passage is available anywhere. It’s also an audiobook, because you can’t keep books when you’re parenting kids. That’s my number one way of consuming content.
Gervase: Ditto.
Jessie: Other ways to find me: my website is jessieherald.com. I write a monthly newsletter that people love—it’s called Imaginalia. It’s like a little zine, kind of harkens back to 1990s feminism. And I’m on Instagram at jessie.es.herald.
Gervase: Amazing. We’ll put all that in the show notes. Thank you so much for your time, Jessie, and I can’t wait to check out the book.
Jessie: Thank you so much.