Welcome back to everymum the podcast, with me Aisling Keenan. Today we are talking about one of the biggest identity shifts a person can go through and one we still don’t talk about nearly enough. Motherhood isn’t just a physical transition; it’s emotional, psychological, social. There’s a word for that transformation and that is matrescence. It's not something I was very familiar with until really recently, but my guest today studies it and is pretty much an expert now. Returning for more chats, Claire Moore is a mother of two, Irish but living in Hong Kong, and is a facilitator for an amazing organisation called Bump and Co. With Bump and Co, they know how unsupported, misunderstood, and invisible many women can feel during their post-partum period and beyond, and they bring a peer-to-peer support together to help new mothers through their experiences. In this conversation, we talk about the genuine gap in the care for new mothers, not just commercially, but emotionally. We also get into the bigger cultural conversation around motherhood: why society still struggles to acknowledge how destabilising and transformative it can be, the pressure to appear like you’re coping, and the tension between the beauty of becoming a mother and the grief of losing parts of your old self. We also discuss whether modern motherhood has become overly optimised and commercialised, and what support for mothers should actually look like in real life, beyond Instagram slogans and vague ideas about “self care.” And if you’re listening as someone currently in the thick of matrescence, feeling overwhelmed or unlike yourself, there’s a really important message in this episode for you too. Here’s my conversation with Claire, and I'll be back next week with more.
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