Is it normal not to enjoy motherhood?

It is somewhere in the middle of the afternoon. The baby is finally asleep. The flat is quiet in that particular way that feels more like held breath than actual peace. You sit down with a cup of tea that will go cold before you finish it, and a thought arrives, the kind you would never say out loud. I do not think I am enjoying this.

You love your child. That is not in question. But love and enjoyment are not the same thing, and somewhere in the fog of the early months, you noticed a gap between the two, and it frightened you. So you typed the question into Google at 11pm, or you scrolled through Reddit threads at 2am looking for someone, anyone, who understood.

Eighty-four per cent of mothers conceal their real struggles when asked how they are doing.^[6] If you searched this question, you are part of that 84 per cent. Here is why the number matters. It means the woman next to you at the baby group, the one who looks like she has it together, is almost certainly feeling the same way and saying nothing.

You are not failing. You are in the middle of something.

If the early months of motherhood have felt flat, relentless, isolating, or just deeply, confusingly unlike what you expected, you are not imagining it. You are not broken. You are not a bad mother. And the feeling does not mean you made the wrong choice.

What it means is that you are mid-transformation. Not mid-recovery. Not mid-adjustment. Mid-transformation, on the scale of adolescence, with none of the cultural scaffolding that adolescence at least tries to provide. There is a word for what is happening to you. Most people have never heard it.

The word that changes everything

In 1973, medical anthropologist Dana Raphael coined the term matrescence to describe the developmental process of becoming a mother.^[1] The parallel with adolescence is not casual. Adolescence brings hormonal upheaval, identity disruption, and a fundamental reorganisation of how you see yourself and your place in the world. Matrescence does exactly the same thing. Only it happens in your thirties, without warning, in a culture that expects you to be grateful and functional within three months.

In 2017, developmental psychologist Alexandra Sacks brought the concept into wider public view, writing in The New York Times that matrescence is a real, named developmental stage that society has largely failed to acknowledge.^[2] The reason so many women feel blindsided by motherhood is not weakness. The expectation that the transition should feel good, feel natural, feel joyful from the start is the problem.

“Matrescence, like adolescence, can be a time of great self-discovery, but it can also be a time of confusion and loss.”

Alexandra Sacks, The New York Times, 2017

The neuroscience adds another layer. A landmark 2017 study by Hoekzema et al., published in Nature Neuroscience, found that pregnancy produces long-lasting structural changes in the brain, specifically in the grey matter regions associated with social cognition, empathy, and threat detection. These changes persist for at least two years postpartum.^[3] Your brain is, quite literally, being rebuilt. A brain undergoing structural reorganisation does not feel settled. It feels off-kilter, overwhelmed, and unfamiliar, which is precisely what so many mothers describe but cannot name.

What the research shows about how mothers actually feel

The Phoenix Report surveyed over 100 professional mothers. The findings are worth sitting with, not as statistics, but as a reflection of how widespread and unspoken this experience truly is.

That 62 per cent figure is the one I want to draw your attention to. Unlike themselves. Foreign in their own bodies. That is not depression as a clinical diagnosis, though depression can certainly be present too. It is the language of someone in the middle of a transformation they were never told was coming. Someone who lost the plot of who she was and has not yet found the plot of who she is becoming.

A note on postnatal depression and postnatal anxiety

Not enjoying motherhood is not the same as postnatal depression or postnatal anxiety, though those conditions are real and more common than most people acknowledge. If you are experiencing persistent low mood, intrusive thoughts, panic, or thoughts of harming yourself or your baby, please talk to your doctor or midwife today. What this post addresses is the broader, widely under-discussed experience of finding early motherhood harder, flatter, or more identity-disrupting than expected, without that necessarily meeting a clinical threshold. Both experiences are valid. Both deserve support.

Why is motherhood so hard?

Motherhood is hard for reasons that have very little to do with you. Three things are happening at once, and only one of them gets talked about.

The first is the work itself. Feeding, settling and broken sleep, every day, with no end of shift.

The second is matrescence. Your brain is restructuring, your hormones are recalibrating and your sense of who you are is being rebuilt. That is a developmental passage as big as adolescence, and almost nobody is told it is coming.

The third is the setting. Most mothers now do this without the village that every culture before ours took for granted, while carrying the mental load of the household and an expectation that they should be back to normal within weeks.

So if you are asking why motherhood is so hard for you, the honest answer is that it is hard for almost everyone. The difference is whether anyone has given you the words for why.

Why nobody is talking about it

The silence is not accidental. When researcher Aurélie Athan published a 2024 paper in Frontiers in Psychiatry calling for matrescence to be integrated into perinatal mental health care, one of her central arguments was that the absence of this concept from clinical frameworks leaves mothers without language for their own experience.^[4] Without language, there is no conversation. Without conversation, there is only shame.

Add to that the cultural pressure of what we call bounce back culture. The pervasive, largely unexamined belief that women should return to their former selves, their former bodies, their former energy levels, and their former professional output within weeks of giving birth. Research by DeLuca and Strohacker, published in Body Image in 2025, specifically recommends replacing the language of “bouncing back” with “reclaiming,” precisely because the former sets an expectation that is medically and psychologically impossible, and causes real harm when women inevitably fail to meet it.^[5]

What you can do with this right now

Knowing the name for what is happening does not make the 3am feeds easier. But it does change the frame, and changing the frame changes what is possible. It also helps to know that the disorientation has a shape. Three stages, roughly, that most women pass through.

Here are four places to start, right now, wherever you are in the arc.

Name it to yourself, out loud

Try saying: “I am in the middle of matrescence. My brain is restructuring. My identity is reorganising. This is not a sign that something has gone wrong.” Say it once a day for a week. The neuroscience of labelling emotions suggests that naming an experience reduces its emotional intensity in the brain’s threat-detection system. You are not being simplistic. You are working with your neurobiology.

Separate love from enjoyment, deliberately

Write down one thing you love about your child and one thing you are not enjoying about this stage. Keep them on the same page. The point is not to resolve the tension between them but to stop treating it as evidence of a problem. Both can be true. Holding both without needing to choose is a skill, and it gets easier with practice.

Find one person to tell the truth to

The 84 per cent figure is only possible because everyone is performing fine in front of everyone else. Identify one person. A partner, a friend, a doctor, a therapist, another mother you trust. Tell them the real answer to “how are you doing?” once. Not the polished version. The actual version. The relief this produces is disproportionate to the effort it takes.

Stop optimising and start observing

One of the features of high-performing women in early motherhood is the impulse to fix the experience. To read more, sleep train better, find a routine that works, optimise the chaos. Try one week of observation instead of intervention. Notice what is actually hard. Notice what is actually okay. The data you gather from honest observation is more useful than any system you could implement without it.