How to stay you with Hilary Oliver
Oct 8, 2026 · 28 min · 17 segments
This week’s guest is Hilary Oliver, who recently published…
Oct 8, 2026 · 28 min · 17 segments
This week’s guest is Hilary Oliver, who recently published…
There's a concept in the front end of the book called matrescence that I had not heard that word before.
It's a term, I think it was coined first in the 70s, but it's really picked up steam in popular conversation lately as the transition to motherhood and basically like an equivalent would be adolescence.
They say matrescence like adolescence and that we really have kind of given mothers a short shrift in this time in their lives because they're so busy in the actual caretaking of the child that the focus is on that.
You are shifting from all these other roles that you've had before into something totally new that you've never done before.
But I think lately moms tend to come to motherhood a little bit later in life these days in the U.S. specifically.
They've been workers and they've had relationships and all these things that build a sense of identity.
And it seems like for mothers who have professional careers, the framing is often around how do you get back to work in that sense? The word work is kind of difficult in this sense because just the act of being a mom is work in so many different dimensions.
This idea of how do you actually get to be some – I don't want to say yourself again because you're always you, but like it's a new version of you, but you want to like – connected to who you've been, I would suppose.
I think there's a lot of pressure to, like you said, get back to you, which also kind of tends to neglect the fact that it is a big transition.
And I think a lot of moms are surprised by unexpected feelings and ways they change unexpectedly, like moms who maybe thought they would want to go back to work right away and then all of a sudden are like, Whoa, actually, I'm not sure about this or vice versa, you know, and just I really like there's a Jungian therapist who wrote a great book called I think it's called Motherhood Facing and Finding Yourself.
And she talks about matrescence being like a furnace or a crucible that like burns off all the dross around you and like burning.
And, and so I think, you know, maybe all those things about like career and relationships and things like that, that are, that are all part of your identity.
It really brings it back down to this core and, and maybe the outside looks a little different, but it, you know, that's part of why I wanted to write this book is to help people like tap into that
There's a concept in the front end of the book called matrescence that I had not heard that word before.
It's a term, I think it was coined first in the 70s, but it's really picked up steam in popular conversation lately as the transition to motherhood and basically like an equivalent would be adolescence.
They say matrescence like adolescence and that we really have kind of given mothers a short shrift in this time in their lives because they're so busy in the actual caretaking of the child that the focus is on that.
You are shifting from all these other roles that you've had before into something totally new that you've never done before.
But I think lately moms tend to come to motherhood a little bit later in life these days in the U.S. specifically.
They've been workers and they've had relationships and all these things that build a sense of identity.
And it seems like for mothers who have professional careers, the framing is often around how do you get back to work in that sense? The word work is kind of difficult in this sense because just the act of being a mom is work in so many different dimensions.
This idea of how do you actually get to be some – I don't want to say yourself again because you're always you, but like it's a new version of you, but you want to like – connected to who you've been, I would suppose.
I think there's a lot of pressure to, like you said, get back to you, which also kind of tends to neglect the fact that it is a big transition.
And I think a lot of moms are surprised by unexpected feelings and ways they change unexpectedly, like moms who maybe thought they would want to go back to work right away and then all of a sudden are like, Whoa, actually, I'm not sure about this or vice versa, you know, and just I really like there's a Jungian therapist who wrote a great book called I think it's called Motherhood Facing and Finding Yourself.
And she talks about matrescence being like a furnace or a crucible that like burns off all the dross around you and like burning.
And, and so I think, you know, maybe all those things about like career and relationships and things like that, that are, that are all part of your identity.
It really brings it back down to this core and, and maybe the outside looks a little different, but it, you know, that's part of why I wanted to write this book is to help people like tap into that
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
