BRAVE
A 12-Week Therapeutic Group Programme for Mothers Facilitated by Jacqueline Kelly
Psychotherapist & Matrescence Practitioner
There is a version of motherhood you imagined.
And then there is the one you are actually living.
The gap between those two things, the exhaustion of it, the grief of it, the love and the rage and the bewildering complexity of it, is something most women carry in silence. Because we have been given no language for it. Because the culture we are mothering inside told us that what we were feeling was either ungrateful or unwell. Because every time we tried to describe it, it felt like trying to describe something that had no name.
It has a name.
What is Matrescence?
Matrescence is the developmental and psychological transformation a woman undergoes as she becomes a mother, psychological, emotional, physical, social, economic, cultural and spiritual. It is the maternal equivalent of adolescence. A passage so profound, so all-encompassing, that it deserves its own name, its own recognition, and its own space to be fully understood.
It does not end when the newborn haze lifts. It recurs with each child. It may last a lifetime.
And yet most women have never heard the word.
BRAVE exists to change that.