You're a few weeks or months into motherhood and something feels off. You don't feel like yourself. You're grieving something you can't quite name. You love your baby but you're not sure you love your life right now. And the question that keeps circling at 3am is: is something wrong with me? The two most common explanations you'll come across are Postnatal Depression (PND) and - if you've been lucky enough to stumble across the term - matrescence. But what's the difference, and how do you...

Matrescence was coined by Anthropologist Dana Raphael in the 1970s. It is the name given to the transition all women go through when they become a mother. Just like adolescence, when we are children becoming teenagers, the changes are remarkably similar , everything shifts hormonally, physically and emotionally, and just like adolescence, we never go back to who we were before. We have changed. And like adolescence, this is not something that needs to be fixed. It should not only be accepted,...

When I found out I was pregnant, I was terrified. Not just because of the pregnancy itself, but because the moment I told my daughter's dad, he left. Just like that, I was alone. I want to talk about solo pregnancy today — not the glossy, "you've got this mama" version you see on Instagram, but the real, raw, complicated version. The one where you're lying awake at 3am wondering how you're going to do this. The one where you're watching other couples at antenatal appointments and feeling a...