Featuring

Claire's search leads her to Australian author Amy Taylor-Kabbaz (Hay House), who has been fighting for this word to be recognised for more than a decade, and opens Claire's eyes to the world of science behind matrescence. She travels to Columbia University in New York to meet Dr Aurélie Athan, the psychologist who resurrected the term "matrescence" — coined in the 1970s by American anthropologist Dana Raphael — and reframed the transition to motherhood as a developmental milestone as real, and as radical, as adolescence. From there, the film widens into a global investigation: a Yale-trained cognitive neuroscientist in Australia scanning the maternal brain; a GP in regional Australia treating what he calls "postnatal depletion"; a psychotherapist in London mapping the existential dimensions of new motherhood; a corporate leader in New York confronting the motherhood penalty; and community health workers in Kenya rebuilding the "village" that industrialised societies have lost.

Woven through the science is Claire's own story — a traumatic birth, a decade of silence, and the album and social movement that grew out of one song she was too afraid to share. As matrescence gathers momentum as a cultural and scientific idea (including a campaign to have the word added to the dictionary), the film builds to a simple, urgent question: what would change — for mothers, for families, for society — if we finally recognised this transition for what it is?