Words · Wonder · The Women Who Need Both
I want to tell you about the word matrescence.
You may have heard it. You may not have. Either way, stay with me – because it is the word that started a rabbit hole I could not stop following, and it ends with something I think you are going to want.
Matrescence – coined in 1973 by medical anthropologist Dana Raphael and brought to wider attention by psychiatrist Alexandra Sacks in a 2017 New York Times essay that went everywhere – describes the identity transformation of becoming a mother. The physical changes. The hormonal upheaval. The psychological remaking. The experience of waking up inside a life that used to fit you perfectly and realizing something has fundamentally shifted.
Raphael noticed something that should have been obvious: we had a whole vocabulary for adolescence – the becoming of adulthood – but nothing for the becoming of motherhood. So she built a word. She went to the Latin root mater, added the same suffix that gives us adolescence, and handed women a word for something they had been living without language for decades.
When Sacks brought it back into conversation, women responded as if they had been handed water in a desert. There is a word for this. What I am going through has a name.
That is what a word can do.
Naming is not a small thing. In Genesis, God speaks the world into existence – and then invites Adam to name it. To name something is to see it, to honor it, to say: this is real, this matters, this deserves a word.
So I started wondering. If we have matrescence for the becoming of motherhood – what about all the other becomings? What about the transformations that are just as real, just as seismic, that English has simply… never named?
This Is a Fun Exercise. Stay With Me.
I am not a linguist. I am a woman who has been paying attention. And what I noticed is that English has some startling gaps when it comes to the experiences that change us most profoundly.
We have widow. We have orphan. But we have no word – none – for a parent who has lost a child. We have no word for the person who becomes a caregiver for a parent who once cared for them. We have no word for the identity that survives a terminal diagnosis, or the self that emerges on the other side of violence, or the woman who carried a child she never got to hold.
Language looked away from some of our hardest human experiences. And I think that matters.
Here is the thing about neologisms – which is the fancy word for newly coined terms: every word was new once. Shakespeare invented over 1,700 words still in use today, including lonely, bedroom, and eyeball. Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined soulmate in 1822. Brunch was someone’s invention. So was meme, and robot, and doomscrolling.
Words enter the language when a community needs them badly enough to start using them. The word does not have to come from a dictionary first. It has to come from people who recognize themselves in it.
What I have done here is go back to the Latin and Greek roots that gave us matrescence and words like it, and build out the vocabulary I think we have been missing. Some of these are compiled – recovered from classical roots that named the experience but never made it into English. Some are coined – built new from those same roots where nothing existed before.
All of them are offered humbly. These are suggestions. Proposals. An invitation.
But I will also say this: when you read through this list, I think you are going to recognize yourself somewhere in it. And I think that recognition is going to feel like something.
Why Naming Matters
There is a reason the Church names things so precisely. There is a reason the sacraments have names, the sins have names, the virtues have names. Naming is not bureaucratic. It is dignifying.
When we do not have a name for what we are going through, we tend to assume we are the problem. We think we should be further along. We think what we are experiencing is not real enough, not valid enough, not worthy of acknowledgment.
A word says: this is a real thing that happens to real people, and it deserves to be recognized.
The parent who buries a child is living through something so catastrophic that English has never found a word for it. That silence is not mercy. It is abandonment. And I think we can do better.
So here, for the woman who became someone new and had no name for where she landed – a lexicon.
Compiled & Coined: A Lexicon of Unnamed Thresholds
Words for the transformations language was too slow to name.
Losses That Remake the Self
Viduescence / vid-yoo-ES-ens / n.
From Latin vidua (widow; bereft, void) + -escence (the process of becoming).
The identity transformation undergone by a person whose spouse has died. Not merely the state of widowhood – the word for that is viduity, which has existed since the 1500s and which almost no one uses. This is the interior remaking. The becoming of someone new inside a life that used to hold two people. The word viduare in classical Latin means to empty, to strip bare. That is exactly right.
“She did not recognize herself in the mirror anymore – not from vanity, but from viduescence. She was becoming someone she had never prepared to be.”
Orbescence / or-BES-ens / n.
From Latin orbus (bereft of children; bereaved) + -escence.
The identity transformation of a parent whose child has died – including miscarriage, stillbirth, and infant loss. A child is a child from the moment of conception, and this word holds all of it. The classical Latin word orbitas was the term for this exact grief – and here is the remarkable thing: it is also the root of the English word orphan. The Romans understood that this loss ran in both directions. A parent without a child is as bereft as a child without a parent. English forgot that. This word remembers it.
“The language had a word for the child who loses a parent, and a word for the spouse left behind. It had nothing for her. Orbescence is the word language owed her.”
Parentescence / pair-en-TES-ens / n.
From Latin parens/parentis (parent; one who gives origin) + -escence.
The identity transformation of an adult child whose parent has died. The first time you are no longer anyone’s child. The experience of becoming, suddenly, the oldest generation – unshielded, repositioned, required to become something new without the person who first gave you your name.
“He had expected grief. He had not expected to feel so unmoored from his own name – as though the person who had known him longest had taken something of him along. That is parentescence.”
Fratrescence / fra-TRES-ens / n.
From Latin frater (sibling; brother/sister in the broader classical and ecclesiastical sense) + -escence.
The identity transformation that follows losing a sibling. You lose not only a person but a witness – the only other person who shares your origin, your earliest memories, your childhood home as it actually was. You also lose a role. The eldest. The youngest. The one in the middle. Fratrescence is the work of learning who you are without the person who knew you before you knew yourself.
“She had been someone’s little sister her entire life. After he died, fratrescence set in quietly – the slow work of learning who she was without the person who had known her since before she could speak.”
Becomings That Remake the Self
Patrescence / pa-TRES-ens / n.
From Latin pater (father) + -escence. The male counterpart to matrescence.
The identity transformation of becoming a father. We have spent decades talking about matrescence – and rightly so. But the man standing next to her in that delivery room is also being remade. Patrescence is not matrescence. It is its own thing. The displacement of the self-centered life by a life ordered toward another. The slow, unglamorous, extraordinary becoming of a man who is now, before everything else, a father.
“The birth did not only give him a son. It unmade and remade him. Patrescence is not a single moment; it is the slow becoming of a man who is now, before all else, a father.”
Avescence / ah-VES-ens / n.
From Latin avus/avia (grandfather/grandmother) + -escence.
The identity transformation of becoming a grandparent. You have raised children. You thought you understood love’s full range. And then someone hands you a person who belongs to your child, and you discover a love with almost no ego left in it. Avescence is also a reckoning with time – you are now both the beginning and the end of a visible chain, and everything you give must be given freely, without possession.
“She had raised children. She thought she knew love’s full range. Avescence taught her otherwise – a love with no ego left in it.”
Inversio / in-VER-see-oh / n.
From Latin inversio (a turning about; a reversal of expected order).
The identity transformation of becoming the caregiver for an aging or ailing parent. The role reversal that no one fully prepares you for – when you become the one who decides, protects, tends. The one who holds the hand that used to hold yours. Grief is folded inside this caregiving. Love expressed through logistics. The long, quiet adjustment to a relationship that has been permanently reordered.
“She bathed her mother the way her mother had once bathed her. There was no word for what that cost and what it gave. Inversio is the word it deserved.”
Ruptures That Remake the Self
Pathomorphosis / path-oh-MOR-foh-sis / n.
From Greek pathos (suffering; what one has undergone) + morphosis (the process of being shaped).
The overarching transformation worked on a person’s identity by trauma – the shaping of the self by what it has suffered. Not the trauma itself. The becoming that follows it. The person who emerges on the other side, permanently altered, carrying the knowledge of what she now knows in her body. Pathomorphosis does not mean broken. It means changed in ways that cannot be undone – and sometimes, by grace, in ways that become the most important thing about you.
“She was not who she had been before it happened, and she was not destroyed either – pathomorphosis had deposited her somewhere new, shaped by something she had not chosen, where she found that God had arrived before her.”
Vulnerescence / vul-ner-ES-ens / n.
From Latin vulnus/vulneris (wound; injury inflicted from without) + -escence. The root of our word vulnerable.
The identity transformation of a survivor of violence or assault. Not the wound – the becoming after it. The particular work of rebuilding a self that now knows, in the body, what it did not know before, and of integrating that knowledge without being defined entirely by it.
“She was not broken. She was in vulnerescence – the long, unglamorous work of becoming a person who had survived what she had survived.”
Diagnoscence / dy-ag-NOS-ens / n.
From Greek diagnosis (a discerning; a knowing-through) + -ence.
The identity transformation that follows a terminal or life-altering medical diagnosis. The experience of becoming, in a single conversation, a person with an irrevocable before and after. The reorganization of everything – time, priorities, relationships, self – that serious illness demands. Not coping. Becoming.
“The doctor had used careful words. She had stopped hearing them after the third sentence. Diagnoscence had already begun.”
Fidolysis / fid-OL-uh-sis / n.
From Latin fides (faith, trust; the root of fidelity and confidence) + Greek -lysis (loosening; dissolution).
The identity transformation of losing religious faith. Not intellectual doubt – the dissolution of the interior architecture that faith had built. The collapse of the framework for meaning, for morality, for self. The particular grief of losing God: the silence where consolation used to live, and the long work of becoming a self that does not know where to bring its heaviest things anymore.
“He had not announced it. He had simply stopped. Fidolysis does not always arrive with drama – sometimes it is the slow going-out of a light one did not know was keeping the room warm.”
Fidogenesis / fid-oh-JEN-uh-sis / n.
From Latin fides (faith) + Greek genesis (origin; new creation). The counterpart to fidolysis.
The identity transformation of recovering, returning to, or finding faith. Not restoration – new creation. A faith that has been chosen rather than merely inherited, or recovered rather than simply retained. Belief that now carries the weight of having once been absent. Fidogenesis is what the prodigal son experienced when he came to himself and started for home. It is the faith that has paid for what it knows.
“She did not return to the faith of her childhood. She arrived at something harder and more certain. Fidogenesis is not restoration. It is new creation.”
Your Turn
This list is not finished. It cannot be – because human experience is not finished, and language is a living thing that belongs to the people who speak it.
These words are offered as a starting point. A proposal. A small correction to English’s long habit of looking away from its hardest experiences.
But I want to know what is missing. Because you are living things I have not thought to name. You have been through doorways that have no words yet. And if the experience is real – if it remade you, if you came out the other side as someone who did not exist before – then it deserves a word.
What threshold have you crossed that language has never named? What experience changed you so completely that you became, in some essential way, a new person – and found no word waiting for you when you arrived?
Tell me in the comments. Let’s build this together.
Because every wound deserves a word.
– Martina
Sources & Further Reading
Dana Raphael coined the term matrescence in 1973. Alexandra Sacks, MD brought it to wide attention in “The Birth of a Mother,” The New York Times, May 2017, and her subsequent TED Talk.
On neologism and how new words enter English: Merriam-Webster’s entry on neologism; Christopher Green, associate professor of linguistics, Syracuse University, interviewed in Phys.org, July 2025.
The Latin root orbitas and its connection to both parental bereavement and the English word orphan is documented in classical Latin dictionaries and etymology sources.
