How Do I Hold Onto Myself When Nothing Is Going the Way I Planned?

You catch yourself introducing yourself and almost mentioning the job you no longer have. Someone asks what you’ve been up to, and you don’t know how to answer anymore. You look around your own house and realize almost everything has changed except the question quietly following you from room to room.

Am I disappearing?

It’s not that you feel like someone else. It’s that the person you were no longer quite explains your life.

Sometimes the hardest part is that everyone else is adjusting to who you’re becoming at exactly the same time you are. Partners, friends, coworkers, parents, all orienting to someone new while you’re still meeting that person yourself.

This Has a Name: Matrescence

In 1973, medical anthropologist Dana Raphael coined a term for exactly this experience: matrescence, the developmental transition into parenthood, comparable in scope to adolescence. Clinical psychologist Aurélie Athan has since expanded the concept, describing a transformation that reaches into biology, psychology, relationships, and a person’s whole sense of meaning, unfolding over months and years rather than arriving all at once.

The term was coined to describe the maternal experience specifically, but the developmental transition it names isn’t limited to mothers. Anyone who becomes a primary, consistent caregiver goes through a real neurological and psychological reorganization, regardless of gender or biological relationship to the baby.

Most people imagine becoming a parent as adding a role on top of who they already are, like picking up a new job or a new hobby. Matrescence suggests something much larger. Becoming a parent isn’t addition. It’s becoming a different person, the way adolescence didn’t add a role to childhood but replaced the child with someone genuinely new.

Why This Transition Feels Different From Every Other One

Adolescence, whatever else is hard about it, at least unfolds slowly, across years, with room to try on different versions of yourself before settling into one. This transition doesn’t offer that kind of room. It compresses a comparable identity shift into months, while simultaneously removing almost every fixed point you’d normally use to track who you are: the due date moves, the birth happens differently than planned, the baby’s actual needs are unknowable until they arrive and demand to be met immediately, the schedule that used to hold your days together simply stops existing.

You’re being asked to become someone new while nothing around you holds still long enough to watch it happen. Am I disappearing? isn’t a strange question to be asking in the middle of that. It’s close to the only honest one available.

The Version of You That Already Did Its Job

Here’s a harder way to say what’s actually happening, and a gentler one underneath it. You’re not trying to hold onto yourself, exactly. You’re trying to hold onto a version of yourself that has already done its job. That version isn’t being erased. It’s becoming the soil from which the next version grows, present in everything that follows.

Some Parts of You Really Won’t Come With You

That reframe doesn’t mean nothing is actually lost, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty. Some parts of you really won’t come with you into whoever you’re becoming. The person who could leave the house without planning around naps. The relationship that used to belong only to two people. The certainty about where your days were headed. The version of you who could imagine the future without first wondering who else might need you inside it.

Mourning those things isn’t resisting parenthood. It’s how people move honestly from one life into another, instead of pretending the move cost them nothing.

You’re Allowed to Be an Unfinished Draft

You’re allowed to feel like an unfinished draft of yourself for a while, uncertain which parts are staying, which are changing shape, and which haven’t revealed themselves yet. That’s not evidence you’re disappearing. It’s what the middle of a real becoming is supposed to feel like, long before it resolves into whoever you actually are on the other side of it.

The question was never whether pregnancy would change you. It always would. The deeper question is whether you’ll mistake transformation for disappearance.

If You’re Looking for This Kind of Companionship

In Awe was built for exactly this kind of season, the identity work underneath all the practical rearranging, the parts of becoming a parent that don’t resolve on anyone else’s schedule. Join In Awe whenever you’re ready.