Matrescence: The Identity Shift No One Can Prepare You For
By Alexia Leachman, founder of Fear Free Childbirth. Alexia healed her own tokophobia and developed the method she used to do it – and has helped women clear their reproductive fears for over 10 years.
The car I wouldn’t give up
For a year after my first daughter was born, I drove a sporty little hatchback that had no room for a pram.
Not “not much room”. No room. The boot couldn’t take it, so the pram travelled on the back seat, shoe-horned in next to the car seat, every single time I went anywhere. Any sensible person would have changed the car. I was not, on this subject, a sensible person. Because that car was her car – the woman I’d been before. And, more importantly, I was not ready to drive a mum car.
I tell you this because it’s why I want to start this new section of Fear Free Childbirth, and what I think it needs to talk about. There’s a word for it – matrescence, the process of becoming a mother, a whole-person remodelling of identity, brain, body and relationships as profound as adolescence. It’s a useful word and you’ll see it a lot around here. But I’m not going to pretend the word changed my life. It didn’t. What changed my life was living it – a year of wrestling a pram into a back seat because some part of me hadn’t yet agreed to become the woman with the bigger boot.
The becoming nobody schedules
I’ve spent some time thinking about this, and here’s where I’ve got to with it, and why it blindsided me. And, why I suspect it blindsides so many women who run their own show.
When you’re employed, the identity shift gets forced on you by admin and your employer. Someone has to arrange your maternity leave. There are conversations about handovers, about what you’ll do after, about who covers what. You are made to sit with “things are about to change” months before the birth, whether you like it or not.
When you’re your own employer, none of that happens. Nobody books the meeting (well I didn’t!), and there’s no handover meeting. I simply assumed I’d carry on as before and drag the baby along with me. Then reality arrived – the feeding, the pram, the car – and I ground to a halt, a year into an identity shift I hadn’t noticed I was refusing.
I couldn’t have prepared for it anyway. Not really. People can tell you about the identity shift; you still have to live it, and it’s different for every woman depending on the mother you had, the work you do, the friends around you. But knowing it was coming – knowing it was a thing, normal, nameable, survivable – would have changed that year. That’s the job of this section.
Becoming a mother with no mother
I did my becoming alone. My mum died years before my daughters arrived, my French grandmother too, and I wasn’t surrounded by pregnant friends. The NCT acquaintances were lovely enough, but we didn’t resonate – and honestly, the mum groups weren’t built for me. I needed a mum group for women juggling a business, not a timetable of baby yoga and pramfit. I was forever arriving late from work I couldn’t put down, and I could feel what they thought: flaky. I wasn’t flaky. I just didn’t have eight open months dedicated to raising a baby. If you’ve ever been the odd one out at a baby group, you have my whole heart.
With nobody to ask, I discovered where my mothering actually lived. I read almost no baby books. One of the few I did read was Bringing Up Bébé, and halfway through it I laughed out loud: my mothering style was completely French. Everything I’d absorbed from the French women who raised me was still in me – I just couldn’t ring them to talk about it. What I could do was tune in.
Because here’s the thing about all the parenting wars – co-sleeping or not, breastfeed until whenever or not at all, cry it out or never. Whatever your stance, there’s a book against you. And that’s because there isn’t one right way. There’s only the groove that works for you and your baby, given who you both are – and the only way to find it is to stop searching outside yourself and tune in. Every time you outsource the answer – to the book, the forum, the mother-in-law – you’re teaching yourself not to trust your own guidance. Mine was all I had. It turned out to be all I needed.
The gift I didn’t want
Now the part I never expected to say about a fear that once ruled my life: if it wasn’t for my tokophobia, there is no way I would have been the mother my kids needed me to be.
The fear forced me to deal with my emotional baggage before the babies came – partly because I’d read research suggesting a highly stressed pregnancy could contribute to conditions like allergies, eczema and asthma in the baby, and I had all three of that unhappy family and was determined the line stopped with me. So the woman in the week before the birth was unrecognisable from the woman who’d seen the positive test. When my waters broke, what I felt was excitement. Genuinely – bring it on, let’s meet this baby.
And the work kept paying after the birth, in a way that I hadn’t anticipated. The buttons your children press are your oldest triggers – and I’d cleared so many of mine in pregnancy that when my kids were simply being kids, I could stay calm. By my second daughter I was a steadier mother again, because I’d kept healing in between. Years later we moved countries mid-pandemic – new language, lost friends, all of it – and my girls rode that storm and came out confident and happy. I don’t think that’s luck. I think that’s what a mother’s inner work does downstream, for years.
Which is why the hardest sentence in this piece is also the reason this site exists: I wish I’d discovered my tokophobia sooner – so I could have done the work sooner, and become a mother sooner. If you’re reading this with a fear you haven’t faced yet, that sentence is for you. I wish someone had said to me.
Why a “tokophobia site” is opening a matrescence section
Because they were never two subjects. Fear around pregnancy, birth and motherhood is your attention being called to something – and dealing with it is how you meet yourself more deeply before your child does. The fear conversation and the becoming conversation are the same conversation at different gears. Fear just gets a bad rap.
And because this transformation deserves infinitely more honour than it gets. We hand women a six-week check and a “bounce back” narrative for something as hormonally and psychologically enormous as adolescence – the making of the next generation, treated as an inconvenience to schedule around. That’s not any individual woman’s failing; it’s the system around her. It makes me properly mad, and this section is one of my answers to it.
But here’s what this section won’t be: more of me. There are women who have dedicated their working lives to matrescence – researchers, practitioners, mothers who’ve studied this becoming far more deeply than I have. On this subject I’m a visitor: someone who lived it, alone, and did the best she could with what she had. So I’m opening the floor. If matrescence is your territory and you have something to say, this platform is yours to say it on: write for us.
The becoming is finally getting its own address. Welcome to it.
Keep reading
- The Maternal Brain, with Jodi Pawluski
- Postnatal meets Perimenopause with Linda Stephens
- How Puberty Trauma Shapeshifts into Fear of Pregnancy and Body Image
Alexia supports families planning pregnancy and birth. She helps them to overcome their fears and feel calm and confident about birth and pregnancy.
Alexia also trains birth professionals in the Fearless Birthing, a unique approach to birth preparation that is ideal for those who have fears around birth.
- Matrescence: The Identity Shift No One Can Prepare You For - 24th August 2026
- Society Has a Plan for You the Moment You Become a Mother. You Didn’t Agree to It. - 23rd July 2026
- Your Mother’s Birth Is Already in Your Leadership – Here’s How to Find It - 23rd July 2026