Matrescence: why it took me almost three years to feel like myself again.
I have one kid. He's three. And it took me until he was almost three to feel like myself again, except "myself" is not really the right way to put it, because the woman I became is not the woman I was before him.
Let me back up.
Around six months pregnant, something started happening to my brain that nobody prepared me for. Not the cute "pregnancy brain, ha ha, I forgot my keys" kind. I mean mentally dull. Missing whole pieces of conversations. Struggling to remember things I used to be completely on top of. Feeling confused, foggy, like I was watching my own life through a slightly warped window. That was the worst part, and it did not go away once he was born. It stuck around a long time, probably until he was 18 months old. Maybe closer to two.
Underneath that fog, something else was also happening, something the pregancy and maternal research talks about a lot: the attunement to another person's needs, the intuition, the ability to make a hundred decisions a day without blinking. Those shifts were starting too, within weeks of his birth. But I was too tired, too uncomfortable, too emotionally wrung out to recognize any of it as change. All I knew was that I was not myself anymore. I had no idea there was a becoming happening underneath the exhaustion. I just knew I felt lost.
It took until he was two and a half, maybe three, before the fog actually lifted enough for me to see what had happened. And here is the part I was not expecting: I did not feel like I had gotten myself back. I felt like a different, stronger version of myself had shown up instead. I stopped grieving who I used to be and started recognizing who I had become.
There is a word for what I just described. It is called matrescence.
Matrescence— ma-TRES-ehns (phonetically: /mæˈtres.ənts/) —is the developmental passage a woman moves through as she becomes a mother: physically, hormonally, socially, and psychologically. An anthropologist named Dana Raphael coined the term back in 1973, and she chose it purposefully to echo "adolescence" because of its similar effects on the human brain. A psychologist named Aurélie Athan picked the concept back up decades later and carried it into clinical use, and researchers have found measurable, long-lasting changes in brain structure after a first pregnancy (a 2016 study out of Leiden University tracked it directly), concentrated in the regions tied to reading and responding to other people. I did not know any of that while I was in it. I just knew something had rewired, and for a long time it did not feel like an upgrade.
The sentence that changed in my head.
Before my son, I was ambitious. Sharp. Creative. I had the kind of energy that let me work all day, do dinner and drinks that night, and do the whole thing again the next day without blinking. It genuinely energized me.
But here is what almost nobody would have guessed from the outside: I was less confident then than I am now. Not that the imposter syndrome disappeared once I became a mother. It did not, and it still shows up. But the sentence running underneath it changed.
Before, when something felt like a stretch, the voice in my head said: "Oh, I could never do that. I don't have the experience."
Now, the same kind of moment gets a different sentence: "I don't have the experience to do that, but I could figure it out anyway."
That is not a small shift in wording. That is the entire distance between staying stuck and starting a business.
What I actually thought I had lost.
For a long time, I read my own postpartum self wrong. I thought I had lost my ambition. My drive. Before my son, I poured everything into finding the best possible solution to a problem, every time, no matter how long it took. After, it started to feel like I was just settling. Taking whatever solution worked instead of the perfect one.
Turns out, I was not settling. I was stripping perfectionism out of my own decision-making, and I just did not have the vocabulary for it yet. What I mistook for a mental capacity shift was actually a priority shift. I had not gotten less capable. I had gotten less interested in spending three extra hours chasing perfect when good and fast got the same job done. Turns out that is not a downgrade. That is exactly the instinct a business owner needs.
From "how do I make money" to "how do I own my time?"
I had thought about working for myself for close to twenty years before I had my son. Every single time I got close, imposter syndrome won. I did not have the credentials, the confidence, the whatever-it-was I was convinced I needed first.
After he was born, the entire question changed shape. It stopped being "how can I make money doing something of my own" and became "how can I own my time while making money." That is a completely different business plan. And underneath it, my priorities had rearranged themselves without asking my permission. I stopped focusing on my own comfort and started asking what was actually best for him.
It took trying to build Square by Sarah for me to even notice the shift had happened. Twenty years of wanting this, and it was only after my son that it actually felt possible, and more than possible, like the right thing to do. It stopped being about me. It became about what it would mean for him to have me around more.
Fit the job around the family, not the family around the job.
That sentence is the whole philosophy behind how I built this business, and it came directly out of everything above. It is not a slogan I picked because it sounded nice. It is a rule I built because the alternative could have kept me stuck for another twenty years.
If you are standing where I was, foggy, unsure whether the woman who shows up now is a lesser version of the one who used to stay out late and chase the perfect answer, I want you to hear this directly: she is not lesser. She is faster, clearer, and considerably harder to rattle. She just needed some time to notice it.
Ready to build something that’s yours, fair and square?
That is exactly what The Confident Creators Studio is for. It is an eight-week, build-with-me program for women who already have the instincts and just need a clear, doable path to turn them into a website and a business that is genuinely theirs. It runs on The Fair & Square Method, five steps built around the same idea that got me here: you build a business honestly, with your own hands, in the pockets of time that are actually yours, so it ends up looking and sounding entirely like you.
You already did the hardest part of becoming who you are. This next part is simply proof of who you already became.
You've built a beautiful life for everyone else. Now it's time to build something that's yours.