The Reason You Feel Like You're Failing at Motherhood Might Have Nothing To Do With Now

If you've ever quietly thought "maybe I'm just not cut out for this" — the problem almost never lives where we think it lives.

I want to tell you something I wish someone had told me in those first foggy months after my C-section.

I was short-tempered in a way I didn't recognise. I'd snap, then cry about snapping. I was anxious in ways I couldn't explain — checking the baby, checking again, honestly unable to settle and rest. I felt like I was drowning in a life I'd wanted my whole adult life.

And the story I told myself, quietly, was: maybe I'm just not cut out for this. Maybe I'm not going to be the mum I thought I'd be.

If you've ever thought some version of that — maybe I'm too impatient for this, too emotional, too scattered, too much, not enough — I need you to sit down for this one. Because what I've come to understand, both as a mother and through my work with hundreds of other mothers, is that the problem almost never lives where we think it lives.

The Part of the Transition Nobody Tells You About

There's a word for what you're in, and I wish someone had handed it to me in a hospital pamphlet: matrescence.

Coined by medical anthropologist Dana Raphael in the 1970s and brought back into the conversation by reproductive psychiatrist Dr Alexandra Sacks, matrescence is the psychological, hormonal, emotional and identity transition of becoming a mother. It's often compared to adolescence — and not casually. Neuroscience research has shown that the brain changes of pregnancy and early motherhood are structurally similar to the brain changes of puberty. Your brain is, literally, reorganising itself into a new version of you.

It's one of the biggest transitions a human being goes through in a lifetime.

And almost nobody tells you it's happening.

You're handed a baby, a discharge sheet, and a follow-up appointment. The world moves on. And somewhere underneath the washing and the feeds and the pretending you're fine at the school gate, a quiet question is forming in your chest:

Who am I now?

Why So Many Mothers Feel Like They're Failing

Here's what I've noticed after years of sitting with mothers, and from my own experience:

The women who come to me worried they're "not coping well" aren't broken. They're not weak. They're not doing it wrong.

They're stuck mid-transition.

And the reason they're stuck, more often than not, traces back to a place we almost never think to look: the birth itself.

And your brain — whether you've realised it or not — has already written conclusions from it.

Conclusions like:

• My body failed me.
• I wasn't strong enough.
• I lost control.
• I didn't handle that well.
• Something went wrong — and I think that something was me.

Those conclusions don't stay politely in the past. They quietly become the foundation your motherhood is built on. And if the foundation is "something is wrong with me," every hard moment of motherhood is going to land on top of that belief and make it heavier.

The impatience. The anxiety. The emotional reactions that feel bigger than the situation. The sense that you're one bad day away from unravelling. These aren't character flaws. They're often the surface of a story that never got to finish being told. And every story needs a beginning, a middle and an end — or in this case, a semicolon.

"It Was Long But Fine"

Here's the thing. Most mothers have talked about their birth.

But it's usually the edited version. The dinner party version. The one we've trimmed down so it fits into the space other people are comfortable holding.

• "It was long but fine."
• "Ended up being a C-section."
• "It was hard, the baby's healthy, that's what matters."

We tell those versions so many times we start to believe that is the story. But inside you, the full thing is still sitting there. The moment you realised something was happening. The thing the midwife said. The minute your partner looked at you and you knew what they were thinking. The feeling of having people around you, but being completely alone in the experience. The look on your own face in the mirror the next morning.

Your brain hasn't forgotten any of it. It's just never been given the chance to put it in order.

And the research has been saying this for decades, we just haven't listened.

The birth of a baby — and the birth of a mother — is the most significant thing that can happen to us, regardless of whether trauma was present or not. And yet we give it no space in our lives. If you've ever wondered whether what you felt was "a lot," given that your baby came home safely — you weren't overreacting. You are in the overwhelming majority.

What Your Brain Is Actually Doing

After birth, your brain can store the experience in pieces — emotions, moments, sensations — without ever fully putting them together. That's not a failure of yours. That's what brains do when something intense happens fast.

When you finally tell the whole story — properly, in order, with the feelings attached — your brain starts to put the pieces into place. That's why so many mothers cry the first time they write it out, or say it out loud. It's not that something's wrong. It's that something's finally settling.

Read that again.

The story doesn't have to be neat when you start. The becoming neat is the whole point. The becoming neat is the medicine.

Why This Is The Place To Start

If you're reading this nodding, or crying a little, or feeling something tighten in your chest — take that as information. Your body knows before your mind does.

You can read every gentle parenting book in the world. You can do the breathwork. You can try the mindset shifts and the morning routines and the meditations. And some of that will help.

But if the origin story of your motherhood is still sitting unprocessed inside you, you're trying to build a new identity on a foundation that never got finished.

You have to go back to the beginning.

Not to relive it. Not to dig for trauma that isn't there. Just to finally tell the whole story, in order, with all the feelings attached — the hard parts and the sacred parts, the frightening and the powerful. Because some of you had beautiful births that you've still never told properly, to yourself or others, and that matters too. A beautiful birth deserves to be honoured just as much as a hard one deserves to be processed.

When you finally put the story somewhere — on paper, into words, into shape — something shifts. The brain stops treating it as an open loop. The question changes from "what's wrong with me?" to "look what I moved through." Or from "I had a good birth" to "this is what my birth story taught me about myself."

And that is a completely different foundation to build the rest of your motherhood on.

That is matrescence finally moving forward.

You don't have to do it today. You don't have to perform being okay.

But when you're ready — the transition you're in the middle of deserves to be finished. And it starts right back at the beginning.

Jade x