What Our Grandmothers Couldn't Say
On Eastern European mothers, inherited silence, and what matrescence finally forced me to feel
I dreaded having a girl.
That's not something I say lightly, and it's not something I've always been able to say out loud. But it's true. When I was pregnant, somewhere underneath the excitement and the anticipation, there was this quiet dread, because every woman I could look to in my life, in my family, in my social circle growing up in Romania, was either dominated by the men around her, or playing the victim, or sacrificing herself so completely that she had disappeared. There was no role model I could point to and say: that. I want that for my daughter.
All I felt I had to pass on was pain and personal oblivion.
This is the story that matrescence eventually forced me to sit with. Not the happy story, not the transformation arc that ends neatly, but the real one, the one that started long before I gave birth, in the bodies and silences of the women who came before me.
The Women Who Came Before Us Didn't Have the Luxury of Feelings
To understand the emotional inheritance of Eastern European women, Romanian women in particular, you have to understand what the women in our lineage actually lived through. Not as a history lesson. As a body memory that is still running in many of us today.
WHAT RESEARCH TELLS US
Researchers studying historical and collective trauma in Eastern Europe describe a "post-communist syndrome" which materialises as a pattern of learned helplessness, deep mistrust and emotional shutdown that resulted from decades of living under surveillance and oppression. This wasn't just political. It lived in families, in kitchens, in bedrooms, in the way mothers held, or didn't hold, their children.
In Romania specifically, the trauma targeting women's bodies was extreme and documented. From 1966 until 1989, Ceaușescu's Decree 770 made abortion illegal for most women. Contraceptives were removed from sale. Women were monitored monthly by a gynecologist. Pregnancies were tracked by the state until birth. The secret police stationed themselves in hospitals. The woman's body was, legally and practically, state property.
The profession of midwife (historically a woman who accompanied other women through birth, a figure of care, of knowing, of trust) was abolished. Birth came under the total control of the male-dominated medical system. Newborns were separated from their mothers immediately, placed in communal rooms, managed for efficiency. Care for the mother, as a concept, essentially vanished.
This is the system our grandmothers gave birth inside. Our mothers too, for many of us.
And then there is the broader communist context: the message to all Eastern European women that they were simultaneously expected to be heroic workersandheroic mothers, while their individual needs, feelings and identities were entirely erased by the state. Researchers have identified two archetypes that communist Romanian propaganda used to shape womanhood: The Steel Woman - strong, selfless, productive, and Maternal Glory - the mother who gives her children to the nation. There was no version of womanhood that included "and also, she had her own inner life and it mattered."
ON SILENCE AS SURVIVAL
Studies of Eastern European families from the Soviet-era document a striking pattern: communication within families was marked by deep secrecy surrounding political and personal trauma. The survival messages passed between generations included "keep a low profile," "do not talk about what happened" and "choose a safe profession." When feelings were dangerous, when you could not trust your neighbours, sometimes not even your friends or relatives, the resulting emotional shutdown was not weakness. It was strategy.
So, my stone grandmother was not cold. She was surviving. The problem is that the strategy outlived the conditions that made it necessary. And it got handed down as love.
The Messages I Grew Up With
I didn't grow up in a gulag. I grew up in a regular Romanian family, surrounded by regular Romanian culture. But the messages were everywhere, so consistent that I absorbed them the way children absorb language: without knowing I was learning anything.
Resting is laziness.
We will rest when we die.
You can always do better.
Other people's needs always come first.
Endure, because there is no other way. etc
These are not cruel messages. They were given with love, I believe that now. They were the wisdom of women who survived by not stopping, by not needing, by not asking. They were handing me the tools that had kept them alive and intact.
I built my entire life on those tools. I became very, very good at enduring. At performing competence. At striving for perfection. At appearing fine. At putting my needs so far down the list that eventually I stopped noticing I had any.
And then I became a mother. And everything I had built so carefully, over thirty years, collapsed.
Matrescence Doesn't Let You Keep Your Coping Mechanisms
The coping mechanisms I had developed to perfection for thirty years went down the drain. All at once.
This is what nobody tells you about becoming a mother: it doesn't just change your schedule and your body and your sleep. It reaches back. It opens every door you have carefully kept shut. It makes you look at your own relationship with your mother, and your mother's relationship with her mother, and the whole line of women before you, and you cannot look away anymore.
Matrescence, the psychological, emotional and identity transformation of becoming a mother, is the developmental passage that does this. The word was coined by anthropologist Dana Raphael in 1973 and later expanded by researchers like Dr. Aurelie Athan: just as adolescence describes the transformation from child to adult, matrescence describes the transformation from woman to mother. It is not a mood. It is not a phase. It is a complete reorganisation of who you are.
And for women who carry an Eastern European inheritance - the stoicism, the selflessness performed as virtue, the shame around needing - matrescence is not just a personal identity crisis. It is a confrontation with generations.
WHAT RESEARCH TELLS US ABOUT INTERGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION
The mechanism of passing trauma from one generation to the next is complex, operating through parenting styles, family communication, attachment patterns and even biology. Families shaped by the collective (communist) trauma tend to appear emotionally numb, view discussing feelings as weakness and unconsciously pass those patterns on. It is not a character flaw. It is how survival gets encoded.
When I became a mother, I had to ask myself: what am I passing on? What did I receive that I want to break, and what did I receive that was actually love, just wrapped in survival mechanisms?
I Was Already Living in the Netherlands. It Didn't Matter.
I had been living in Amsterdam for years before I became a mother. Both my daughters were born here. Which means I had already been surrounded by Dutch society and parenting culture, watching it from a distance and finding it both fascinating and foreign, long before I had children of my own.
And still. When matrescence hit, the Romanian programming came flooding back as if the Netherlands had never happened.
That is the thing about inherited patterns: they don't care where you live. They were written into you before you had any say in it.
I was shocked by how laid back Dutch moms were: from babies playing in the mud with snot covering their whole face, to parents letting their kids make choices that would clearly end badly, to children who were allowed to be genuinely opinionated. Even when they were wrong. Even when it was inconvenient.
Dutch parenting culture operates from a fundamentally different emotional baseline. Motherhood here is approached more as something to be experienced, even enjoyed, rather than endured. There is a word in Dutch - niksen - the art of doing nothing without guilt. The cultural permission to just... stop. To not be productive every moment. To let things be a little messy.
Structurally, the Netherlands makes it easier to breathe: part-time work culture, fathers who are genuinely present and involved. But it goes deeper than policy. Dutch culture has a strong tradition of directness: you say what you feel, what you need, what is not working. Asking for help is not weakness. Struggling is not shameful. Therapy and coaching are normalised in a way that would have been inconceivable in the Romania I grew up in and the one I Ieft behind all these years ago.
I watch my Dutch friends parent with a looseness I genuinely admire, and I also catch myself, nine years in, still working to give my girls the same space. Still fighting the voice in my head that calls their confidence "entitlement," their assertiveness "disrespect." Still feeling my inner child get worked up when they speak up boldly, make demands, take up space. Because I was never allowed to do that. Because none of the women in my family were.
The contrast is sharpest when I think about my Romanian friends who are still living in Romania, still surrounded by very high standards and a deeply judgmental culture of mothers. I can see in them what I might have become had I stayed. And I can see in myself, even after all these years in Amsterdam, how much of that is still running underneath.
I see the huge difference between how I am as a mother now - after nine years of working on myself, prioritising my own needs and desires, trying to model something different for my girls - and my Romanian friends back home. The geography changed for me. The inner landscape took much longer.
This is not a judgment of Romania or Romanian mothers. It is an observation about what happens to women when the culture around them never gives them permission to need anything and how deep that goes, how far it travels, how stubbornly it stays even when everything around you is telling a different story.
The Shadow Side of Motherhood Is Real and Silence Makes It Worse
Here is something I have learned, both from my own matrescence and from sitting with the mothers I work with: the feelings we are most ashamed of are the ones we most need to name.
Maternal ambivalence, the simultaneous experience of deep love and frustration, tenderness and resentment, joy and grief, is not a sign that something is wrong with you. It is a documented, universal, entirely normal part of motherhood. Psychiatrist Barbara Almond calls it "the hidden side of motherhood." Researcher Rozsika Parker described it as the tension between loving and not-so-loving feelings that every mother carries.
But naming it matters enormously. Researchers describe a powerful dynamic: when mothers find words for what they are living, something shifts. The naming itself is medicine. It moves an experience from "there is something wrong with me" to "this is part of what motherhood is."
ON SHAME VS GUILT
Research distinguishes clearly between guilt ("I did something wrong") and shame ("I am something wrong"). Mothers who carry cultural messages about selflessness and endurance are especially vulnerable to shame, because the gap between the ideal mother (who never resents, never tires, never needs) and the real experience of motherhood is so vast. Closing that gap, through naming, through community, through honest conversation, measurably reduces psychological distress.
For Eastern European women specifically, the shadow side of motherhood carries an extra layer. It's not just "I love my baby and I also resent this." It's "I love my baby and I also resent this AND I was raised to believe that having needs makes me weak AND I watched the women before me disappear into their families AND I don't know if I'm allowed to want something for myself AND I'm terrified of what I'm passing on."
That is a lot to carry alone. That is exactly why it needs to be said out loud.
What We Can Choose to Pass On Instead
My grandmother did not have the language for what she carried. My mother barely had more. I am the first woman in my lineage who has had the privilege of time, safety, education and community to look at all of this and decide: this is where it changes.
Not because I'm better. Because I was lucky enough to have the conditions for something different.
Matrescence gave me that opportunity, not gently, not without cost, but completely. It stripped away every story I had about who I was supposed to be. And in that stripping, it asked: who do you actually want to be? What do you actually want your daughters to inherit?
I want my girls to grow up watching a woman who rests without guilt. Who says "I need something" without apologising for it. Who knows the difference between enduring and thriving. Who shows them that a mother is not an object of sacrifice, but she is a full human being, navigating one of the most profound transformations of her life.
My life and my experience of motherhood is not a perfect picture. I still struggle. I still catch myself falling back into the old messages. I still have moments where my inner child, the one who learned that needs are inconvenient, gets in the way of parenting the way I want to parent.
But I know what it's called now. I know it has a history. I know it is not my character, but my inheritance. And knowing that is where change begins.
Your grandmother was not cold. She was surviving. You are not broken. You are in the middle of becoming. And matrescence, however disorienting, however painful, is the passage that makes it possible to choose something different for the daughters who come after you.
If any part of this resonated with you, if you recognised yourself, your mother or your grandmother in these words, I would love to hear from you. This conversation is far from over. It's just finally beginning to be had out loud.
Much love,
Anca