When You're the Only One Moving: Running Through Matrescence

There’s a peculiar kind of silence that comes with early motherhood. Not the peaceful kind, but the kind that feels like waiting — for your body to feel like your own again, for your energy to return, for someone to really see you.

This is matrescence: the quiet, often invisible transformation a woman undergoes when she becomes a mother. It’s not just physical. It’s neurological, hormonal, emotional. It’s your identity stretching at the seams.

Unlike adolescence, which arrives with milestones and rituals, matrescence often comes unannounced, unsupported, and unnamed. It includes the shifts in your sense of self, your relationships, your nervous system, your worldview, all colliding at once.

It’s a framework rooted in anthropology and increasingly recognised in maternal mental health research. And it explains why motherhood can feel like losing yourself and finding yourself in the same breath.

But out on the trail, there is movement. And that changes everything.

Naming the Blur

Matrescence doesn’t happen all at once. It unfolds in waves, often alongside sleepless nights, cracked nipples, career reshuffling, and questions like: Am I still me?

In the midst of all this, movement, whether running, walking, or hiking, becomes more than exercise. It becomes reclamation. A space where no one is asking you to be anything but present in your own body. One foot in front of the other. Breath settling into rhythm. Autonomy stitched quietly back into your skin.

You may not go far. You may not go fast. But you are moving, and that matters more than anyone knows.

Motion in the Stillness

Matrescence is often marked by stillness. Feeding on the couch. Rocking at 2 a.m. Waiting for your body to heal. For the baby to sleep. For your own mind to quiet down.

So when you lace up and leave the house, even just for 20 minutes, you become the only one moving in a sea of still. It can feel selfish. Or brave. Or both.

But movement through matrescence is a way of meeting yourself exactly where you are: between your old life and your new one. It offers a glimpse of strength not in spite of motherhood, but because of it.

No One’s Handing You a Finish Line

There’s no finish line in matrescence. No certificate that says you made it back to yourself. But there are markers:

The first solo trail after birth. The moment you no longer second-guess leaving the house without a nappy bag. The day your run feels like more than a survival mechanism, it feels like joy again.

Movement through matrescence is rarely linear. Sometimes it looks like shuffling. Sometimes like pausing halfway up the hill and crying. But it’s still movement. Still you.

And that is enough.