There is a specific kind of disorientation that comes with becoming a mother that nobody warned you about.

Sure, we’ve heard about the sleeplessness, the overwhelm, and you were prepared for those or at least you knew they were coming. This is something else. This is looking in the mirror and not quite recognizing the woman looking back. This is reaching for yourself and finding a gap where you used to be. This is feeling, quietly and persistently, like you are somehow two different women.

The one you were before, and whoever this is now, and not being able to fully be either one.

If that is where you are, what you are experiencing has a name. And understanding it may be the most important thing you do in your motherhood right now.

I am Vanessa, an integrative perinatal mental health certified therapist and wellness coach. I work with women of color navigating matrescence, postpartum, and the early years of motherhood, and I am a mother who has lived all of this from the inside.

I have spent fifteen years working with women of color, and several years working specifically with mothers navigating the identity transformation of motherhood. What I have come to understand, through my own matrescence rites of passage and through the women I sit with every week, is that what you are experiencing is a passage that our culture has never properly named or prepared us for.

In this post, I am going to give you that name, trace it through the scholarship that actually explains what is happening in your body and your identity, and then go somewhere most matrescence conversations do not: what this passage looks like specifically for high-achieving women of color who built their sense of self on being the one who does not fall apart, and why that history makes the disorientation cut deeper.

By the time you finish reading, you will have language for what you are moving through. And language, as I tell my clients, is the beginning of no longer being confused about your experience.

What Matrescence Actually Is and How I Found It

I was about four or five months postpartum when my husband and I had one of those conversations that stays with you.

I was trying to explain to him that I didn’t feel like I was losing myself exactly. What I was feeling was more like an expansion. Like I was becoming someone larger than who I had been, but I hadn’t met her yet. I didn’t know who she was. I had never seen her before. And that in-between space, between who I had been and whoever this new woman was, was disorienting in a way I didn’t have words for.

I knew it wasn’t a perinatal mood and anxiety disorder. That’s almost always what we talk about when we talk about the emotional experience of new motherhood — depression, anxiety, the clinical presentations we screen for and treat. And I was trained to recognize those.

What I was experiencing didn’t fit that picture. But I also didn’t have another frame for it, which left me confused in a particular way: something real was happening, and I didn’t have language for it.

So I did what I do.

I went on a deep dive one night while I was breastfeeding, searching for something that could name what I was moving through. And that is when I landed on Amy Taylor-Kabbaz’s website and came across the word matrescence for the first time.

I remember the feeling of reading it. The immediate, almost physical recognition of why didn’t anyone say this to me while I was pregnant? Why didn’t anyone say this to me in the postpartum?

Matrescence is the profound physical, psychological, emotional, and social process of becoming a mother.

A passage as significant as adolescence; it is a complete reorganization of identity, values, body, relationships, and sense of self, that our culture has never properly named or honored until recent years, and honestly in my opinion there is still work to be done to make matrescence more mainstream. The term was first coined in 1973 by anthropologist Dana Raphael, the same researcher who introduced the concept of the doula. She saw what was happening to women in the transition to motherhood and gave it a name. And then, for decades, that name largely disappeared from mainstream conversation.

It was Dr. Aurélie Athan, a psychologist at Columbia University, who revived and formalized matrescence as a field of academic study. Her work expanded the concept into what she calls reproductive identity — the profound reorganization of self that happens when a woman becomes a mother. A developmental passage that rewrites identity at the neurobiological level.

Dr. Alexandra Sacks, a reproductive psychiatrist, brought matrescence into mainstream conversation through her widely watched 2018 TED Talk. I remember finding her video on YouTube on another night of my long nursing sessions, and I was blown away. She centers the experience around ambivalence. On the simultaneous, often disorienting reality of deep love and profound loss living in the same body at the same time. If you have ever felt guilty for grieving the life you had before while also being completely in love with your child, that is what she is naming.

After finding Amy’s work that night, I went on to train as a Mama Rising Matrescence Facilitator, a program she created to bring this framework to practitioners working with mothers. And it was in that training that I first encountered the concept that I now use constantly with my own clients: what Amy calls the inner split.

It is the concept that changed how I understood not just my own experience of new motherhood, but the experience of almost every woman I work with.

And it is what the rest of this article is about.

The Inner Split

The inner split is the felt experience of being two people at once, and not being able to fully be either one, initially.

The woman you were before motherhood is still in there, even when it’s hard to feel her. Her ambitions, her rhythms, her humor, her drive, her professional identity, her relationship to her own body. She remembers who she was. She reaches for it sometimes, especially in quiet moments, and finds herself surprised to still recognize her own hand.

But a new woman is also emerging alongside her. She has different edges, different limits, different things she will and won’t carry. She doesn’t fit cleanly into the old life. She makes the people around her, and sometimes herself, uncomfortable.

The inner split is the gap between those two women. It is the grief of the version of you that isn’t coming back, and the disorientation of a self that hasn’t fully arrived yet. It is living in the in-between without a map.

Matrescence coach Katrina Court did a whole episode on understanding the inner split that is worth listening to if you want to go deeper on this. What I want to do here is go somewhere that most conversations about the inner split don’t go: what it specifically feels like when you are a high-achieving woman of color, like most of my clients.

But first, something I want to name from my clinical work that I rarely hear said elsewhere.

Most conversations about the inner split assume you have enough room to actually feel it. They assume a kind of internal margin — enough stillness, enough space — to sit with the grief of who you were, to get curious about who you’re becoming. But in my work with mothers, I’ve noticed that motherhood often shrinks that margin significantly. The depletion compounds. The mental and maternal load expands. And when you’re running that low, the inner split isn’t something you can examine; it’s something you’re surviving inside of.

You can’t fully grieve who you were when you don’t have the bandwidth to sit with grief. You can’t fully meet who you’re becoming when you’re too depleted to be curious. The integration work that matrescence asks of you requires a foundation that chronic depletion and an unsupported maternal load make very hard to access.

This is part of why I work on capacity before I work on identity. Not because the identity questions don’t matter, they matter enormously, but because the conditions have to shift first.

And for women of color, those conditions come with their own specific weight.

Why the Inner Splits Hits Differently for Women of Color

Here is something the mainstream matrescence conversation often glosses over.

Many of us did not arrive at motherhood with a simple, uncomplicated sense of self that motherhood then disrupted. We arrived already holding more than one version of ourselves. The version that was acceptable in predominantly white professional spaces. The version that showed up for our families no matter what. The version that performed strength because softness was not always safe. The version that kept moving because stillness meant being seen as less than.

We were already code-switching before we had children. Already carrying, and already doing the invisible labor of navigating a world that was not built around us.

So when people talk about the inner split in matrescence, I always want to ask: but which version of you are we talking about? Because for a lot of the women I work with, that split didn’t start when the baby arrived. It started long before.

There is a reason for that.

In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins describes the impossible position Black mothers occupy — expected simultaneously to be selfless caregivers, community anchors, and unwavering providers, with no cultural permission to be depleted by any of it. That expectation does not pause when you become a mother. It intensifies. And the self that gets quietly erased in the middle of all of it is not an accident; it is a structural outcome.

That erasure has a longer history too.

The expectation of sacrifice without reciprocity, of emotional labor without acknowledgment, of giving without anyone tracking what was being taken, is what bell hooks documented it in Ain’t I a Woman, and it did not end with the generation she was writing about. When you feel like motherhood took something from you and nobody around you seems to understand what was lost, that feeling is not you being ungrateful. It is you recognizing something real that has never been properly named in the spaces where you live your life.

And then there is the line I come back to, year after year, more than almost anything else in my work. Audre Lorde wrote in Sister Outsider: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

She wrote that as a Black woman navigating illness, motherhood, and a world that consistently asked her to pour from an empty vessel. She was naming, decades ago, what so many of my clients are still living right now, that the self who needed tending kept being told to wait. That her needs were optional. That her restoration was a luxury she had not yet earned.

Melissa Harris-Perry describes something she calls the “crooked room” in Sister Citizen — the idea that Black women have historically had to stand upright in spaces that are structurally tilted against them, contorting themselves just to appear straight. I think about this constantly in my work. Because by the time motherhood arrives, many women of color have been contorting themselves for years.

Performing.

Adjusting.

Shrinking or expanding to fit whatever the room requires.

So the inner split in matrescence, for women of color, is not just the split between who you were before and who you are becoming. It is also the split between who you have had to perform and who you have never had permission to fully be. It is the accumulation of all the versions of yourself you have held, and the exhaustion of realizing you don’t actually know which one is the real one, or if any of them ever got to be.

That is a different kind of disorientation than what most matrescence literature describes. And it deserves to be named as such.

Why This Hits Women of Color Differently

Let’s be real, many of us did not walk into motherhood with a full tank.

We were already carrying the weight of being the one who holds it together, who shows up, who does not let things fall apart. We know the specific exhaustion of navigating spaces that were not built for us. The hypervigilance that does not turn off, ever. The experience of going to a doctor and not being fully heard, and then going again and still not being fully heard.

Dr. Arline Geronimus, a public health researcher, documented what she called the weathering hypothesis: that Black women’s bodies experience accelerated biological aging due to the cumulative physiological cost of chronic stress in navigating racism over a lifetime. This is not metaphorical wear. It is measurable. It shows up in stress hormones, in inflammation, in the body’s ability to recover. And it does not pause when you become a mother.

It stacks.

While the weathering research focuses specifically on Black women, the physiological toll of racialized stress is not limited to one community. Latinas, Asian American women, Indigenous women, and women of color broadly carry their own specific and documented forms of chronic stress — from immigration-related pressure, to cultural expectations of selflessness and sacrifice, to the particular invisibility of being unseen in medical spaces that were never designed around your body or your experience.

The details may differ, but the biological cost of navigating a world not built for you does not.

Many women of color arrive at motherhood already running a physiological deficit that mainstream maternal health conversations rarely acknowledge. When you feel like you are working twice as hard to feel half as well, you are not imagining it. You are not being dramatic. Your body has been carrying more than anyone named, and it needs more to recover than anyone told you.

This is why I often say you do not need another coping tool to start with, we need to be refilled.

What Does Inner Split Actually Look Like for Women of Color

I work with mostly women of color, and that has been the case for 15 years or more at this point. I specialize in working with mothers of color specifically, so I write about them.

The one who sends me a voice memo at 10pm because that’s the only quiet in her day. The one who is six months postpartum and already back to performing like she never left. The one who is three years into motherhood and still waiting to feel like herself again, and starting to wonder if that self is just gone.

For her, the inner split doesn’t always look like crying in the bathroom, though sometimes it does. More often it looks like something quieter. Being in a meeting and realizing the answer to what do I actually want isn’t coming anymore, and it used to always come. Scrolling through old photos and feeling far from that woman in the pictures. Noticing she has become very good at telling everyone she is fine.

It looks like loving her child fiercely and still grieving something, and then feeling guilty for the grief, because look at what she has, which creates its own split.

And for the high-achieving woman specifically: it looks like being self-aware enough to know something is happening, but not being able to think her way out of it. That one lands differently when thinking has always been the thing that works.

This is not pathology, even though it feels like one, and society has largely treated it as one. The inner split is part of Matrescence, and a rite of passage. But for women of color navigating it without adequate language, without cultural rites, without support that honors both the transformation and the history they carried in, the passage can become a place they get stuck.

How to Actually Move Through The Inner Split

The inner split doesn’t resolve by pushing through it.

It doesn’t resolve by performing your way back to yourself, or reading enough about it, or waiting until life settles down. Those are the things most of us try first, and they make sense, because they are the tools that have always worked. But this particular passage asks for something different.

It asks you to get specific about what you’re actually grieving. Not “I’ve lost myself” as a general feeling, but what, exactly. What did you have before that you are mourning? What parts of her are you being asked to release? That specificity matters, because vague grief is much harder to move through than named grief.

It asks you to separate the loss of the old self from the resistance to the new one. They feel similar but they need different things. The old self needs to be honored. The new self needs to be met slowly, with curiosity, not as a project to optimize but as a person you are still getting to know.

And inner split work asks you to build language, with your partner, with a therapist, with other mothers who understand, so that what you’re carrying stops living only in your body and starts having words. The loneliest version of this passage is moving through it alone because no one around you has the framework to understand what is happening.

You don’t have to do that.

When women move through this, it doesn’t look like returning to who they were. It looks like arriving somewhere new. The grief gets softer, not completely gone, but held differently. The mourning for the old self becomes something more like honoring: she carried me here, and now she is releasing me forward. And the new self, the one who has been emerging this whole time, starts to feel less like a stranger.

I have to be honest with you: this is actually my favorite part of work in Matrescence, is supporting women through the inner split.

You Are Not Two Women Forever

The inner split is not a permanent state. It is a passage; the disorienting, often unnamed in-between of becoming someone your old life didn’t have language for yet.

The woman you were before motherhood is not gone. And the woman you are becoming is not a threat to her. They are part of the same arc. What feels like fracture is actually expansion, and expansion is uncomfortable before it becomes livable.

The disorientation is real. The grief is real. The not-yet-knowing is real. And so is what is on the other side: a self that is larger, more rooted, and more fully yours than the one who walked into motherhood.

You are not falling apart. You are becoming.

If this is something you are sitting with and you want to go deeper, I write and talk about matrescence, identity, and what this passage actually looks like for women of color regularly. Come find me on Instagram at @matrescenceincolor.