I’ve been a doula in Los Angeles for more than ten years, and there’s one moment I see over and over.

It usually comes a few weeks after the baby arrives. The visitors have come and gone, the meal train has wound down, and the house is eerily quiet at 3 a.m. That’s when a new mom will look at me, and say some version of: “Why do I feel like I don’t know who I am anymore?”

I always want to reach over, take her hand and tell her: nothing is wrong with you. You’re in the middle of matrescence but nobody has told you the word yet.

Matrescence is the physical, emotional and psychological transition of becoming a mother. Anthropologist Dana Raphael named it in the 1970s, and psychologist Dr. Aurélie Athan has spent years expanding on it. Both compare it to adolescence.

When I first heard that comparison, something in me exhaled. Nobody expects a 13-year-old to “bounce back” from puberty. We understand that their body, brain, relationships and sense of self are all being remade, and we give them years to grow into it.

Becoming a mother is the same kind of passage, and it deserves the same patience. Your hormones shift, your sleep, your priorities, your relationship, your style, your friendships and your work life all rearrange, often all at once. Many women carry two things in the same breath: an overwhelming love for their baby, and real grief for the life they had before.

Both are allowed, and having both doesn’t make you ungrateful or a bad mom. It makes you someone in the middle of a big change.

In Korea, the weeks after birth have a name and a plan. Sanhujori is a centuries-old tradition of postpartum recovery: a new mother stays warm, rests, eats nourishing food like miyeok-guk (seaweed soup) and lets others do chores and put away laundry while she rests. Today, more than 85% of new mothers in South Korea spend time in a dedicated postpartum care center.

Here, most of us go home from the hospital within a day or two and are expected to just manage. I think about that difference a lot.

You don’t need to fly to Seoul to borrow the spirit of sanhujori. Here’s where I’d start:

The “baby blues” are common. Many new moms feel weepy, overwhelmed or irritable in the first two weeks, and it usually passes on its own. But if any of these last longer than two weeks, or feel heavy from the start, please don’t wait it out. It’s time to reach out:

Partners and friends, you’ll often notice these before she says them out loud. Trust what you’re seeing.

We treat birth like the finish line, when it’s really the starting line. The weeks after shape how a mother heals, how she feeds her baby and how she comes to see herself as a mother.

I’ve sat with women who put everyone else first for far too long, and I’ve watched what happens when someone finally steps in and holds things for a while. Sometimes that means a warm meal or a few hours of sleep, sometimes it just means someone saying “you’re doing beautifully” and meaning it.

So if you take one thing from this, let it be this: what you’re feeling has a name and it’s normal. And if you love a new mom, ask her how she’s doing, then sit down, and ask her again how she’s REALLY doing.

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Start with your OB, midwife or pediatrician. You can also call or text the National Maternal Mental Health Hotline at 1-833-TLC-MAMA (1-833-852-6262). It’s free, available 24/7, and offers support in English and Spanish.

Get help right away if a new mom has thoughts of harming herself or her baby, believes her family would be better off without her, sees or hears things that aren’t there, or seems confused and not like herself. These can be signs of postpartum psychosis or a mental health crisis, which are medical emergencies. Call 911, or call or text 988.