When our first son was about eight weeks old, my partner and I sat down and made a schedule.

It showed a normal week: childcare four days, a sitter two evenings, my partner working 100%, me working 80%. Two days of sport each. Two date nights. Pre-scheduled social events most evenings. It was efficient, optimistic, and completely rational given everything we knew about our pre-kids life.

We were management professionals. I had read every book and blog available about childbirth and motherhood. We had thought about this. We had planned.

I recently found that schedule. I sent it to my partner with the message: "Seriously? This is what we were thinking?"

In the six years since, less than half of what that schedule assumed has ever become reality.

What the schedule revealed

That schedule was not naive. It was a rational response to the information we had been given about motherhood. The problem was that the information itself was incomplete.

Looking at it now, I can read what we actually believed: that sorting childcare was the main task. That willpower would cover the rest. That a packed, optimised schedule was the right model. That we would be as productive and efficient as before. That equality was a matter of fairly dividing visible household tasks. That our child would adapt to the life we had planned. That maternity leave would be sufficient time for any personal adjustment needed.

Inside those assumptions, there were even more: that we would get the sleep we needed. That breastfeeding would not significantly reshape our days. That we would want to go back to work at the rate we had planned.

Nowhere in any resource I had read was there mention of the psychological transformation of becoming a mother. The identity shift. The confidence drop. The grief for the self you were before. The way your relationship with your partner would be renegotiated from the ground up. The way your definition of success and ambition would evolve into something that no longer fit the old frame.

Six years ago, I had not yet heard the word matrescence. I have since built my whole body of work around it.

The research on the expectations gap

My schedule is not an outlier. It reflects a systemic pattern that researchers have now documented across multiple countries.

A study spanning mothers in Ireland, Sweden, and Australia found that first-time mothers consistently described being blindsided by realities that, in retrospect, should have been predictable (Lorén et al., 2024). Mothers described the loss of their pre-mother identity in terms they had not expected to use. The exhaustion that made plans impossible. The gap between the Instagram-worthy image they had been handed and the reality of sitting with "milked breasts and a screaming child."

The data on difficulty is striking. While 21% of women found pregnancy easy, only 5% found early motherhood easy. The percentage rating their experience as difficult jumped from 47% during pregnancy to 59% in early motherhood (Lorén et al., 2024). Our preparation system focuses almost entirely on pregnancy and birth, the phase most women find less difficult, while largely ignoring the postpartum reality of life as a mom that the majority find harder.

The research on expectations and health outcomes is equally uncomfortable. Maternal expectations about anticipated joy were found to be negatively related to physical health: the more happiness a mother expected to feel, the worse her actual health outcomes (Emmanuel & Sun, 2014). This is not about pessimism versus optimism. It is about how the gap between what you expected and what you find produces measurable harm.

41% of pregnant women experience moderate to severe distress. New parents argue nine times more frequently than before having a baby. 67% of couples experience resentment in the early postpartum period (Emmanuel & Sun, 2014).

These are not individual failures. This is a systemic pattern, produced by a system that is systematically not telling the truth.

Why the gap exists: the system prepares you for the wrong thing

The preparation industry for new mothers is enormous. There are books, apps, courses, podcasts, antenatal classes, and social media accounts dedicated to pregnancy and birth. The content is detailed, specific, and abundant.

Almost none of it is about what happens after.

The focus on pregnancy and birth makes a particular assumption: that the hard part is the physical event of giving birth, and that the recovery from it is primarily physical. Once you are physically healed, you are back. The adjustment is logistical. Sort the childcare, negotiate the return to work, distribute the domestic tasks.

What this preparation does not touch is the developmental transition that matrescence actually is.

Matrescence is not a logistics problem. It is a reorganization of identity: psychological, neurological, relational, and existential simultaneously. As the research shows, it takes a minimum of two to three years for the core of the transformation to move through you. Some aspects, particularly the identity reorganization, continue evolving much longer.

Maternity leave is not designed for this. Six weeks, or six months, is not "sufficient time for personal adjustment." It is not sufficient time for the transition to begin to settle. The timeline was designed for physical recovery from birth, not for a developmental passage that takes years.

When you do not know the transition is happening, you cannot prepare for it. And when you have no preparation, the gap between what you expected and what you experience does not produce the question "what support do I need?" It produces the question "what is wrong with me?"

The vicious cycle this creates

The research by Emmanuel and Sun (2014) identifies a mechanism that is important to understand.

Unmet expectations produce distress. Distress makes it harder to meet expectations. Harder to meet expectations produces more distress. The cycle tightens.

The mothers who struggle most in early motherhood are not necessarily those with the hardest circumstances. They are frequently the ones with the most inflated expectations: the most optimistic, the most prepared, the most convinced that they had accounted for everything. Because the gap between a highly positive expectation and a difficult reality is larger than the gap between a realistic expectation and the same difficult reality.

The system feeds you the idealized image, the Instagram-worthy picture, the schedule that looks like everything is manageable. And then the gap between that image and your lived experience lands as personal failure.

Even women who know the images are curated still feel inadequate when confronted with the messy reality. Knowing intellectually that something is unrealistic does not close the emotional gap when you are in the middle of it at 3am.

What the gap is actually about: matrescence was not in the picture

The expectations gap is not primarily about the baby's sleep, or the changed relationship, or the career adjustment. Those are real. But they are symptoms.

The underlying gap is this: nobody told you that you would change. Not as a side effect of having a baby, but as the central event. That becoming a mother would involve the dismantling of the self you were before, a prolonged period of not knowing who you were becoming, and the gradual construction of something new from the pieces.

Nobody told you that the psychological adjustment was real, necessary, and measured in years rather than weeks. That the loss of your pre-mother identity was a developmental feature, not a personal flaw. That the ambivalence, the grief, the questioning of what you wanted, the shift in what felt like success: all of this was the process, not a deviation from it.

As I have seen with hundreds of mothers: when you understand that the psychological adjustment is real, when you know that becoming a mother means integrating a new identity rather than simply adding tasks to your existing life, the expectations gap narrows. Not because the reality gets easier, but because the frame for understanding it changes.

You stop asking "what is wrong with me?" You start asking "what support do I need?"

You stop measuring yourself against a pre-motherhood baseline. You start recognizing that the values and ambitions that are shifting are not dissolving but evolving into something more genuinely yours.

The difference between those two questions is, in the research, the difference between the vicious cycle and the upward spiral.

From the hardest part to the most valuable insight

Between two and seven months postpartum, something begins to shift. Research documents it: women report experiencing more joy as they settle into the new identity (Lorén et al., 2024). One mother in the research described it as: "I have evolved into a role and learned to not be so worried. I will be good enough."

But this adaptation happens despite poor preparation, not because of it.

When the preparation includes matrescence, when women are told what is actually coming and given a framework for the developmental passage they are in, it changes both the experience and the outcomes. Aurélie Athan's research on matrescence-informed education shows that mothers who receive this preparation report significantly greater resilience and reduced feelings of inadequacy (Trinko, Athan & Rosenblum, 2025). Not because their circumstances are easier. Because they understand what is happening.

I founded Matermorphosis because I look back at that early-motherhood version of myself, the one who made the schedule and thought she had accounted for everything, and I feel only compassion for her. She was doing the best she could in a system that had systematically not told her what was coming. And sometimes the hardest challenges contain the most valuable reorientation.

The question is not whether the gap will be there. For most mothers, it will. The question is whether you have enough of the right information to move through it as transformation rather than surviving it as failure.

Want to get the full picture? Download the Map of Matrescence here (Free).

About Babette Lockefeer

Babette Lockefeer is the founder of Matermorphosis and an expert at the intersection of leadership and matrescence. She built Matermorphosis because she looked back at the version of herself who made the schedule and thought she had accounted for everything, and wanted to give other mothers what she did not have: an honest picture of what was coming, and a map for moving through it.

Frequently asked questions about the expectations-reality gap in motherhood

Why is motherhood so much harder than I expected? Because the preparation system focuses almost entirely on pregnancy and birth, the phases most women find manageable, while largely ignoring the developmental reality of the postpartum period and the years that follow. Research documents the pattern clearly: only 5% of women found early motherhood easy, compared to 21% who found pregnancy easy, and 59% rated early motherhood as difficult (Lorén et al., 2024). The gap between expectation and reality is not a personal failure. It is a systemic one: women are not told that becoming a mother involves a genuine developmental transformation (matrescence) that takes a minimum of two to three years, involves a measurable drop in self-esteem, reorganises identity at its core, and cannot be managed with willpower and a good schedule.

Is it normal to feel like no one told me how hard this would be? Yes, and the research backs that up across countries. Mothers in Ireland, Sweden, Australia, and elsewhere consistently describe being blindsided by the realities of early motherhood, not because they failed to prepare, but because the preparation they received was oriented toward the wrong things (Lorén et al., 2024). The emotional and psychological adjustment, the identity shift, the relationship renegotiation, the confidence drop, were absent from the picture they were handed. If you feel like nobody told you how hard this would be, that is because nobody told you. It is not a sign of personal fragility.

Why did my expectations make the experience worse? Research by Emmanuel and Sun (2014) found that the more happiness a mother expected, the worse her physical health outcomes: a direct relationship between elevated positive expectations and poorer wellbeing. The mechanism is the vicious cycle: unmet expectations produce distress, distress makes it harder to meet expectations, which produces more distress. The higher the expectation, the larger the gap when reality arrives, and the harder the internal narrative about what that gap means. This is not an argument for pessimism. It is an argument for realistic preparation: giving mothers an accurate picture of what the transition involves so that the gap between expectation and reality is honest rather than manufactured by idealized imagery.

How long does the adjustment to motherhood actually take? Research and clinical experience point to a minimum of two to three years for the core of the transformation to move through you. The measurable drop in self-esteem documented by Grolleman et al. (2022) reaches its lowest point in approximately the first 18 months, then gradually recovers, returning to the pre-birth baseline around the child's fourth birthday and often continuing to rise beyond it. Some aspects of the identity reorganisation, particularly those involving values, purpose, and relationship to professional life, continue to evolve well beyond that. The six-week return-to-work or six-month maternity leave timeline was designed for physical recovery from birth, not for a developmental passage of this scale.

What is matrescence and why does it matter for the expectations gap? Matrescence is the developmental process of becoming a mother: biological, psychological, social, and existential at once. Understanding it matters for the expectations gap because most of the gap is not about the practical challenges of having a baby. It is about the identity transformation that nobody prepared you for. When you know that the psychological adjustment is real and structured, that the loss of your pre-mother self is a developmental feature rather than a personal flaw, that the questioning of what you want and what success means is the process rather than a deviation from it, the gap narrows. You stop asking "what is wrong with me?" and start asking "what do I need?" That shift is, in the research, one of the most significant factors in how mothers move through the transition.