Somewhere around my son’s second year, I started having these breakdowns in the middle of my kitchen floor.

Just doubled over, in tears, wondering what was wrong with me, why I felt so stretched thin. Why I was running on a body that felt like it had no fuel, no matter how much I slept, how much I tried, how much I told myself to hold it together.

And my son, completely unbothered, would stumble over and try to climb on me. Because I was on the floor and therefore obviously available for a ride.

I was a therapist. I knew what postpartum depression looked like. I knew what postpartum anxiety looked like. This didn’t fit either picture, and it felt like something nobody had given me language for. Like my body was sending signals I didn’t know how to read, and the harder I pushed, the louder they got.

It would take me longer than I’d like to admit to understand what was actually happening.

I’m Vanessa, an integrative perinatal mental health therapist and maternal wellbeing coach. I work with women of color navigating Matrescence, postpartum, and the early years of motherhood. And what I was experiencing on that kitchen floor had a name. It had a framework. And once I understood it, everything shifted — in my own life and in how I work with my clients.

This post is about what was actually happening in that kitchen. What depletion in Matrescence is, why it is so common and so misunderstood, and what it actually takes to move through it.

If you have been depleted in motherhood in a way you cannot explain or fix, this post is for you.

What Depletion in Matrescence Actually Is

Depletion is not a diagnosis. It is not a disorder. It is what happens when your body has been missing what it needs — for a long time — and the gap between what you are giving and what you are receiving has never been closed.

In my work, I describe it to clients this way: it is “chronic not-having”. Not having enough minerals, nutrients, rest, margin, support, or energy.

Not having enough of yourself left over after everyone else has been tended to. And when that goes on long enough, it does not just make you tired. It affects your nervous system, your mood, your hormones, your ability to focus, your sense of who you are.

Dr. Oscar Serrallach, an integrative GP and author of The Postnatal Depletion Cure, was one of the first clinicians to formally name and document this. His research found that many mothers remain nutritionally and physiologically depleted for years after giving birth when recovery is not actively supported. He identified consistent deficits in iron, zinc, vitamin B12, omega-3s, and other nutrients essential to mood, cognition, and hormonal regulation.

What he was describing was not a failure of the individual mother. It was a failure of the systems around her to support her recovery.

What depletion feels like from the inside is harder to measure but easier to recognize.

It is the exhaustion that sleep does not fix. The brain fog that follows you into rooms and makes you forget why you walked in. The emotional reactivity that surprises you, like my tears on the kitchen floor; the rage that comes out of nowhere, the flatness that settles in when you finally sit down. It is the feeling of running a race on a tank that was never refilled.

For women of color, that tank often arrived at motherhood already running low. Not because of personal failure, but because of what our bodies have been carrying long before a baby was born. The physiological cost of navigating racism, of performing strength in spaces that were not built for us, of doing more with less across every dimension of life.

Dr. Arline Geronimus documented the biological reality of this in her weathering hypothesis — the finding that chronic racialized stress accelerates physiological wear in Black women’s bodies in measurable ways. Depletion in matrescence, for many women of color, is not just about what pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, and raising children in this society took.

It is also about what was already missing when pregnancy began.

And that matters because of what Matrescence is actually asking of you at the same time.

What Matrescence Is and Why It Makes Depletion Harder

Matrescence is the developmental process of becoming a mother. The term was coined in 1973 by anthropologist Dana Raphael — the same researcher who introduced the concept of the doula — to describe the profound psychological, neurological, physiological, and social transition a woman moves through when she becomes a mother.

It is not a moment, or a phase you move through and leave behind.

The initial transition, the most disorienting years of early motherhood, tends to be the most acute.

But your identity as a mother will keep evolving with every milestone your child reaches, every season of life you move through, every version of yourself that emerges on the other side of what motherhood asks of you.

The becoming does not stop. It deepens.

Just as adolescence reshapes a person from the inside out over a period of years, Matrescence does the same. Your identity shifts. Your nervous system recalibrates. Your brain literally rewires; neuroscience has literally documented changes in grey matter during the transition to motherhood that parallel what happens in adolescence. Your relationship to your body, your needs, your sense of self… it all gets reorganized around this new role, new life, and new you.

Dr. Aurélie Athan at Columbia University formalized Matrescence as a field of academic study and expanded it into what she calls reproductive identity — the deep reorganization of self that motherhood initiates. Dr. Alexandra Sacks brought it into mainstream conversation through her widely watched TED Talk, naming the ambivalence at the heart of the experience: the simultaneous reality of deep love and profound loss living in the same body at the same time.

Most women are never told any of this is going to happen. I know I wasn’t.

And here is why that matters for depletion specifically: Matrescence is already asking your body and your nervous system to do something enormous.

To rebuild an identity. To hold more than you have ever held. To show up for another human being while you yourself are being reorganized from the inside out. When you are doing all of that from a place of depletion — nutritionally, physiologically, emotionally — the reorganization can be challenging. Because you are being asked to build a house while someone is quietly removing the foundation materials.

Why Maternal Depletion Can’t Wait

Here is the thing about depletion: it does not stay still, and left unaddressed, it compounds.

What starts as fatigue becomes chronic exhaustion that no amount of rest repairs. What starts as emotional reactivity, with the tears that come out of nowhere and the irritability you can’t explain, becomes a nervous system that is permanently stuck in survival mode, firing threat responses to ordinary moments because it no longer has the resources to do anything else.

What starts as brain fog becomes an inability to access the version of yourself that used to think clearly, make decisions, hold a vision for your own life.

The nutritional and hormonal deficits that drive depletion do not resolve on their own. Without active restoration, iron stays low. Ferritin stays low. The thyroid, which governs energy, mood, and metabolism, continues to struggle without the minerals it needs to function. The hormones that regulate sleep, focus, and emotional stability remain dysregulated.

And the longer that goes on, the harder the body has to work just to maintain baseline functioning — which means less and less available for everything else.

But depletion is not only physical.

You start to believe that this is just who you are now. That the version of yourself that had energy and clarity and desire is gone. That motherhood took something permanent from you. I have seen my clients stop asking what she needs because she has learned, slowly, that the answer doesn’t matter — there is no one to give it to her and no margin to receive it anyway.

That is what prolonged depletion does to the soul of a woman. It quietly convinces her that she is the problem.

She is not the problem. She is depleted. And those are not the same thing.

And after years of working with mothers, I learned a path through it.

What Actually Moves the Needle

When I was in the thick of my own depletion, I did what most of us do. I tried to manage it. More sleep when I could get it. Better food when I remembered. Therapy. Journaling. Breathing exercises. All of it helped in the moment, and also it kept not holding too.

What I eventually understood, through my own experience and then watching it play out with client after client, is that I was trying to regulate a nervous system that didn’t have capacity, and the raw materials to regulate. I was trying to do identity work on a body that was still in survival mode.

I was trying to heal from the top down when the body needed to be addressed from the bottom up.

Part of what shifted for me was understanding that motherhood is body-led in a way nothing had prepared me for. My son sought my body for everything — comfort, regulation, nourishment, love. He was breastfed until he was nearly three, and somewhere in that season I understood that this body had to carry both of us through all of it.

For that to be possible, I had to be well, like actually well.

I also started to see the system I was up against clearly and I want to name it, because it matters. The lack of structural support for mothers in this country is not incidental. The absence of paid leave, the thinness of the village, the medical system that discharges you days after birth and calls you back at six weeks still with no real recovery plan, the cultural expectation that you will simply absorb the cost of all of it quietly — that is a rigged system.

And your depletion is also, in part, a rational response to impossible conditions.

In that season, I also realized the system is not going to change before I needed to be well. And so the work — the foundational, unglamorous work of rebuilding my body and my capacity — is not surrendering to the system. It is refusing to let it take me all the way down.

So I started there, with myself and with my clients. With the body. With the most basic, foundational question: what does this woman actually have available right now, and what has been quietly taken from her that nobody replaced?

That meant looking at what was structurally draining her before we talked about anything else. Not just sleep and nutrition — though those matter enormously — but the invisible load. The mental load, the emotional labor, the hypervigilance that never turns off, the lack of margin, the absence of real support. The things that drain a woman’s capacity before she even gets out of bed in the morning.

Then we looked at repletion — actively restoring what pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, and years of caregiving had taken. Not with a supplement protocol handed down from the internet, but with real attention to what her specific body was missing and what it needed to start coming back online.

From there, regulation became possible in a way it hadn’t been before. The breathwork landed. The somatic practices had something to work with. The therapy went deeper because she wasn’t spending all of her session energy just trying to stay above water.

And then — the part that matters most to me — she started to reclaim herself. Not the old self, exactly. But something truer. A woman who had been through something real and come out the other side with more clarity about who she is and what she is no longer willing to carry alone, and who she wanted to be.

What I watched happen, again and again, is that women stopped blaming themselves, and were empowered to take their wellbeing into their own hands.

They started to see the structural systems at play — the information they were never given, the support that was never offered, the impossible standard they had been trying to meet on an empty tank. And that shift in understanding motivated something no habit or routine could have produced: a real, committed decision to put their own wellbeing first.

Not as self-indulgence, but as foundation.

That is the work. And it is available to you.

You Don’t Need to Push Harder, You Need to Be Held.

If you are reading this and recognizing yourself in the exhaustion, in the kitchen floor moments, in the pushing through because that is what is expected of you and what you have always done, I want you to hear this clearly.

You are not failing at motherhood… or at any part of your life.

You are a woman in the middle of a real developmental passage, in a body that has been giving everything it has, in a system that was never designed to give anything back.

The answer to that is not more discipline. It is not a better morning routine. It is not pushing harder into the version of yourself that motherhood has already begun to change.

The answer is support that actually sees what you are carrying, and knows where to start.

I offer intensive therapy for mothers of color in Massachusetts and Texas who are ready to stop managing their depletion and start actually moving through it. Not weekly sessions where the first ten minutes are spent catching up. A dedicated, uninterrupted container where we go deep on what you need, what has been keeping you stuck, and what it looks like to build a foundation that can actually hold you.

If that is what you have been looking for, I would love to talk. Book a free consultation here — no pressure, no commitment. Just a real conversation about where you are and whether this is the right next step.

And if you are not ready for that yet, come find me on Instagram at @matrescenceincolor, where I talk about all of this regularly… matrescence, depletion, all of it, and what it actually looks like to tend to yourself in the middle of Matrescence.