Lifecourse Matrescence

By Jessica Spring Weappa, PhD
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Lifecourse Matrescence©

Matrescence, a term coined by anthropologist Dana Raphael (1926–2016), describes the initial rite of passage into motherhood—a transition marked by profound changes in physiology, identity, emotion, social role, and relationships.

Dr. Jessica Spring Weappa expands this concept into Lifecourse Matrescence©, a framework that understands mothering as a series of developmental thresholds that continue across the lifespan. Rather than a single phase, matrescence becomes an unfolding journey—each stage of caregiving, from infancy through adolescence, midlife, grand mothering, and elderhood, offering new invitations into relational wisdom. Drawing on the lifecourse perspective, this term acknowledges that maternal identity is not static but deepens through time, shaped by evolving roles, cultural context, and embodied experience. Lifecourse Matrescence© honors mothering as a lifelong process of becoming, marked by cyclical rites of passage that generate insight, resilience, and cultural continuity.

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Jessica Spring Weappa, PhD

Dr. Jessica Spring Weappa is an organic intellectual theorizing from life—as a mother, artist, therapist, and scholar-practitioner. She draws from integral transdisciplinarity—spanning psychology, somatics, mythology, ecology, and narrative therapy—to explore what it means to be fully human. Founder of Mothering Futures®, she writes and teaches on matrisophy, matrescence, and maternal wealth. Her scholarly and therapeutic work is shaped by a background in holistic education, depth psychology, and the interdisciplinary arts, as well as formative years in a cooperative farming community rooted in care ethics.
Jessica speaks regularly at academic conferences, community education events, and wellness retreats. Her writing appears in several peer-reviewed collections from Demeter Press and the Journal of the Motherhood Initiative, including Care-Based Creative Futures: Regenerative Maternal Ethics; Luminous Butterfly Weed and Red Thread; Gone Spielreinian: Maternal Ferality and the Suprahumanities; and The Motherlines of Asclepius: Ancestral Female Healers in the Origins of Medicine.

Visit www.motheringfutures.com.

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