The final section of the novel is titled “Matrescence,” directly invoking a concept coined by medical anthropologist Dana Raphael in 1973 to describe the developmental transition into motherhood. Raphael, a student of cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead, argued that the arrival of a child transforms a woman as deeply as adolescence transforms a child, and that Western societies had largely failed to recognize or ritualize this passage. She defined “matrescence” as a period of deep physical, psychological, emotional, and social change during which a woman adapts to a fundamentally new identity.

More recent research by reproductive psychiatrists such as Alexandra Sacks and neuroscientists including Elseline Hoekzema has given empirical weight to Raphael’s insight: Brain-imaging studies have shown measurable, long-lasting reductions in gray matter volume in regions associated with social cognition after pregnancy, changes comparable in scope to those seen in adolescence and believed to help mothers attune to their infants (Hoekzema, Elseline, et al. “Pregnancy leads to long-lasting changes in human brain structure.” Nature Neuroscience, 20 Feb. 2016) Hormonal shifts, including massive fluctuations in estrogen, progesterone, oxytocin, and prolactin, compound the neurological rewiring, and the social changes (altered work status, shifting friendships, renegotiated partnerships) intensify what many mothers describe as a disorienting dissolution of the pre-maternal self. Yet, because Western medicine tends to bifurcate care into “pregnancy” and “postpartum recovery,” the longer arc of matrescence is often dismissed, pathologized, or collapsed into diagnoses of postpartum depression and anxiety.

According to research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “about 1 in 8 women with a recent live birth reported symptoms of postpartum depression” (“Symptoms of Depression Among Women.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 15 May 2024), and rates are considerably higher among women of color, low-income mothers, and those without robust social support. Advocates increasingly argue that naming matrescence gives women a vocabulary for experiences like ambivalence, grief for a former self, intrusive thoughts, altered desire, all of which are common but stigmatized.

Trad Wife portrays an extreme and supernatural version of this phenomenon. Camille’s identity, which is constructed around an already fragile performative online persona, undergoes a complete collapse with the birth of Sweetheart; her scales, fangs, and craving for flesh externalize the very real psychological upheaval that corresponds to matrescence but goes widely unacknowledged in a patriarchal society.