The one response I consistently get to this letter to a mother staying home on Yom Kippur is: I cried reading it.

I teared up writing it, so words that come from the heart, and all. But that's not why it makes you cry.

It makes you cry because it so deeply validates your experience as a mother. Nobody tells you that after you have a baby, you're going to have an identity crisis. You wouldn't understand it even if they did. You're too busy keeping yourself and a new baby alive, trying to be an adult and have a semblance of a life.

It can take a while for you to really grasp that your life is now totally different and in fact, without you fully realizing or paying attention to it, your old life died with the birth of your baby.

It hits you at different times. The most obvious is when you try to leave the house. Goodbye, independence and freedom. No more running out for you. Maybe you notice your values shift, or you start paying attention to stuff you never noticed before, like ingredients and labels. Or you slowly accept that your body will just never “bounce back”, because it’s undergone such a transformation that there’s nothing left to go back to.

It hits you during a pivotal time like Yom Kippur, when you’re suddenly faced with the fact that an experience that’s been true your whole life—the holiness of the day happens in shul—is now inaccessible to you and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future. It’s a long stage, and you’ve found yourself in it.

All of this is called matrescence. It's like adolescence, but for becoming a mother. It's the hormonal, biological, emotional and physiological process you’re experiencing right now—and in fact, for at least 3 years after having each baby, or even for the rest of your life.

Unlike adolescence, which everyone knows and anticipates, nobody talks about matrescence. You consoled your high school friends about pimples and bad hairstyles, but it’s hard to bond over an experience that you think you’re the only one going through.

You’re not the only one going through it. No matter how good that other mom in the park looks, how well she’s dressed or how clean her stroller is, you can bet that she also cried last night because her baby wouldn’t sleep. She also felt irrationally rageful, she may have also screamed at her kid, and she also might feel like she has no idea what she’s doing.

Not because we have to hate on someone else who looks great! Just because someone else is probably looking at you right now and thinking you have it all together. (I’ll never forget a friend who asked me how I looked so good. I looked good because I was returning from teaching high school girls. I was on my way home to change into pajamas!)

It's also true that we're not all always drowning, all of the time. Some of us are thriving. Some of us took to motherhood like a fish to water... and some of us feel like a fish out of water.

The truth is, we’re all on our own journey. Like becoming a teenager, we’re going to peak at different times, do some truly regrettable stuff, and have moments we want to forget. We’re also going to come out the other end as a more fabulous version of ourselves.

Reader 2.0 is on the other side. But it’s not quite as linear as a butterfly emerging from its cocoon. That would be too simple, and real life, especially in motherhood, is messy.

You’re in the cocoon, and you’re also the butterfly. At the same time. You have highs and lows. You soar, and you sink. You fly, and you fail. It doesn’t make sense, but neither does a lot of what it means to be a mother. Our role is full of contradictions. We have to be strong and gentle. We need to give and also take care of ourselves.

Wherever you are in your matrescence journey—and remember that you may be experiencing it on different planes, especially if you have multiple children—is just where you are. But knowing that you’re on it is pretty crucial. It’s validating and reassuring. And if you’ve just been made aware of it, it will probably make you cry.

Have you read the letter yet? Read it here and share the link with a friend.
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ps - I’ve got some ​tips for Yom Kippur day with little kids at home​, including:

• how to get them to play
• ideas of easy meal and snack foods
• pockets of time you can daven in
• some new perspectives

pps - you can access everything you need for Tishrei on this one page​

ppps - matrescence gets a whole chapter in my online crash course for mothers, A Motherhood Manual​