Motherhood, Art, and the Birth of a New Self
- artbykarma
- 5 days ago
- 7 min read
A Personal Account On Matrescence, Transformation & Art
Becoming a mother did not simply add a role to my life. It reorganized my identity, my time, my body, and my relationship to art. For a long time, I believed — quietly but persistently — that motherhood and art were fundamentally in conflict.
Art demanded solitude, risk, immersion. Motherhood demanded presence, repetition, and care. One belonged to the public realm; the other to the private.
But living inside this transformation forced me to confront a bigger question:
What if the problem is not incompatibility, but representation?
There’s a word for what happens to a woman when she becomes a mother. Not the birth of a baby but the birth of a mother. It’s called Matrescence.
American anthropologist Dana Raphael coined the term in the mid-1970s, drawing a parallel to adolescence, that turbulent, identity-shaking rite of passage we all know. Matrescence is the same thing. A profound physical, psychological, and emotional metamorphosis. A death and a rebirth of self.
I came to this word during my MFA research in Bangkok. By then I had been living it for years without knowing its name. But here’s what distinguishes my story from most things written about motherhood: I was not afraid when I became pregnant. I chose this consciously, openly, with my whole heart. And Matrescence still blindsided me.
The Decision
I was thirty when something shifted.
I had spent years stretching outward, shifting from a corporate career in graphic design to building an art practice, exhibiting, teaching, seeking, and traveling. I was deep in what I’d call the conscious scene of the time: festivals, spirituality, abstraction, the pursuit of transcendence. As well as Bangkok’s booming independent gallery scene and street art, after 40 exhibitions and achieving stability doing what I loved, I found myself writing in my journal: Tired of the world. Tired of seeking. Tired of pushing....serving family, serving a child, warms my heart. That could be the next worthy adventure.
It wasn’t fear that brought me to motherhood. It was arrival. A sense that I had stretched outward long enough and was ready to go inward. That the next worthy challenge wasn’t another exhibition, brand collaboration, residency or spiritual retreat. It was this. The most ancient thing.
The prenatal vitamins arrived in January 2018. I wrote about it in passing, sandwiched between notes about an art booth I was opening and reflections on community. No drama. No dread. Just readiness.
I know that’s not the story most creative women tell. I know so many of you reading this are sitting with a different feeling entirely. The fear that your career will pause and never restart. That the work you’ve spent years building will quietly become a hobby. That you’ll show up to your studio one day and not recognise yourself in it anymore. That fear is real, and I want to talk about it, even though my own entry point was different.
Because here’s the thing: I didn’t fear losing my creative self to motherhood. And she still came for me.
The Stingray
A few months before I fell pregnant, I was stung by a stingray in the ocean.
I wrote a poem about it that night. About pain breaking me open. About fighting it first, then surrendering. About the impossibility of contending with nature. I didn’t know then that it was also a poem about what was coming.
There is a particular wisdom in surrendering to something larger than yourself, not from defeat but from recognition. The stingray didn’t ask my permission. Neither does a child. Neither does the transformation that comes with them. You can resist it, or you can let it move through you and become something you couldn’t have planned. I chose the second. Or rather, the second chose me, and I said yes.
What Wonder Looks Like
By December 2018, pregnant and approaching the third trimester, I wrote this in my journal: My body is physically creating another entire human being without my conscious effort. Cells duplicate, bones and organs grow. Her blood circulates with mine. An ancient automatic process. Mysterious and miraculous. Love growing in my uterus.
..And then this, which stopped me when I read it back years later: Did you know? A female foetus produces all her eggs in the womb of her mother. Technically we were all once unfertilised eggs in the wombs of our grandmothers. A pregnant woman carrying a girl has within her two generations ahead. What an incredible thought.
I was amazed. I was in full contact with the biological miracle of what was happening. I was reading about postpartum healing, looking up creative mothers online, already thinking about the MFA I might pursue during the early years of child-rearing. I was making plans. I was curious.
I was also, I see now, completely unaware of what was coming.
For those of you who are afraid: your fear is not irrational. It is information. It is your creative self saying I exist and I matter and I don’t want to be erased. That voice deserves to be heard, not silenced. What I hope to offer is evidence that the voice doesn’t have to go quiet. It just changes what it’s saying.
What Art History Said About All of This
When I turned to art history for companionship through this experience, first as a pregnant woman, then as a new mother, then as a researcher, I found something interesting.
Western art history is full of mothers. From the Venus of Willendorf to Klimt’s The Three Ages of Woman, from the Madonna and Child in ten thousand variations to the radical feminist art of the 20th century. Frida Kahlo painted her miscarriages. Louise Bourgeois gave us Spider, that monumental, terrifying, tender ode to her own mother. Judy Chicago’s Birth Project embroidered the graphic reality of labour itself.
What these artists gave was recognition. The complexity of the experience, held with the full weight of artistic attention. None of them stopped making work. None of them became only a mother. All of them found that motherhood, with all its rupture and grief and ferocious love, became material.
Asian art history told a different story. The mothers in Korean, Indian, and Thai historical art are tender, devoted, shown in relation to their children and their roles. The bond is beautiful. But the inner life, the strangeness, the identity shift, the sheer biological astonishment of the thing, is largely absent. Motherhood is honoured, but the mother’s experience of motherhood has historically been considered private, or secondary, or simply beside the point. Growing up between cultures, I found myself without a mirror in either tradition that could hold the whole of it.
What Matrescence Actually Is
Here is what surprised me, what I had not prepared for despite preparing for almost everything.
Matrescence is not the love. The love I expected. What I did not expect was the reorganisation.
Every priority reshuffled. Every identity renegotiated. Not just mother versus artist, which is the version of this struggle that gets written about most, but something deeper: who am I now that I am also this? What parts of my former self fit into this new container, and what has to be released?
For me the reorganisation was more radical than most. In the years following my daughter’s birth, I came out as queer. I restructured my marriage into a co-parenting partnership. I restructured what home and family meant. I finished a master’s degree. I built a career as a university educator. I became, in almost every dimension, a different person to the one who had swallowed those prenatal vitamins and felt nothing but grateful. My daughter birthed my transformation, authenticity, and unmasking.
And through all of it, my daughter was the fixed point. The one certainty in a sea of reconstruction. The sun in which we all orbited lovingly around.
I wrote this on a Tuesday, waiting for her to come home from school: F*ck, I love my child so much. We have each other. I’m so lucky. Crying writing this.
That is also Matrescence. Not the fear of losing yourself but the discovery that the new self loves in ways the old self couldn’t have imagined.
To every creative woman reading this who is scared: you will not disappear. You will be reorganised. That is not the same thing. The work that comes after will be different to the work that came before, and in my experience, it will be truer, because you will have less patience for anything that isn’t real. Whatever coping mechanisms you had to fit in a neat social container simply fall away and you will be stripped to your very essence of who you are.
What I Know Now
Matrescence is real regardless of whether you come to motherhood in fear or in wonder. It doesn’t care about your emotional preparation. It reorganises you anyway.
What changes, I think, is the quality of the reorganisation. I arrived curious, open, already in love with the idea of who this person would be. And so when the hard parts came, and they came, I had a foundation. A knowing that I had chosen this. That the transformation, however disorienting, was one I had said yes to in the ocean that day with a stingray.
If you are a creative woman standing at this threshold and you are afraid: your fear makes sense. Creativity is identity. Identity is self. And you are being asked to let yourself be fundamentally changed by someone you haven’t met yet.
What I can tell you is that the self that comes out the other side is not smaller. She is just different. And she makes different work, work that couldn’t have existed before, because she now knows things that can only be learned from the inside.
I did not lose myself in motherhood. I expanded into it.
And my daughter, who is funny and demanding and brilliant and completely her own person, is the best work I have ever made. Though I would never tell her that. She would absolutely roll her eyes. -
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