Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood

by Lucy Jones

Pushing a person out of my body was an extraordinary feeling. The pain was unrecognizable. I trusted the midwives and my husband, who were encouraging me, but surely I was dying or at least splitting in half. It burned and stung and my eyes rolled back and forward as I sucked in and held the oxygen that allowed my body to push. It took over an hour.

My insides and outsides, vagina and cervix, skin, muscle and soul roared. I had never wanted anything more than to get the baby out and for her to be alive and healthy.

In the days and weeks afterwards, I thought about the birth constantly. I felt the need to talk about it, but to whom? I recalled the ecstasy and the agony. I was in shock and also in awe of my body. I was fascinated by what happened, how overwhelming it was. How close to death I had felt. How close to death it felt like we had been. It was the most dramatic and frightening experience of my life. The pain and loss of control took me to a place that I don’t think I’ve ever returned from. I wanted to talk about it, but there was no one really to talk to and there were only so many times I could subject my husband

Our vocabulary occludes the maternal: we do not have words for the different kinds of pain that occur in childbirth. ‘Pain’ just doesn’t cut it. And partly it was because of the continuing taboo around birth,

It was not traumatic. Still, I wrote down afterwards: you must never, ever do this again. But I did.

My back and torso ached from twisting into uncomfortable feeding positions all day.

found it harder to make conversation now, as I was adapting to spending most of the time alone (well, not technically: the strangeness of caring for a young baby is feeling alone, while never actually being alone).

something strange happened. I found I couldn’t fully concentrate on what she was saying. Every sound or movement the baby made drew my eye to her involuntarily. I kept trying to focus and interpret my friend’s anecdotes and questions as I would’ve done before matrescence, but the

felt frustrated. Why couldn’t I simply talk to a friend? Why couldn’t I override this occupation for an hour? I hadn’t yet realized the relational reality of our dyad; that, really, I was no longer the individual I thought I once was.

When I was among relatives I didn’t feel embarrassed about my focus being on her rather than the conversation, but I was aware that there was something robotic, automatic happening.

would happen at night. When she cried out, I

When I tried to take some time away from her, I found I was never comfortable or relaxed.

the impact of pregnancy on the brain is as significant as the impact of adolescence. The

Again, more research is critical but the science of the maternal brain published to date tells us that mothers in this vulnerable period need care, and particularly protective social policies. The one strategy which seems to inoculate most new mothers against mental illness is social support. Social support, according to scientific tools and scales, includes emotional and

It is exciting to see how powerful social support can be for new mothers. But perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise,

To be a smart species – to be able to learn and read and write and draw and solve and build and invent and empathize and imagine – humans have to be born vulnerable.

Oxytocin triggers the release of neurocannabinoids that make us feel high.

began to realize that I wouldn’t ever be able to take all her pain away.

Is everyone frightened every day that their baby will die?

The isolated parenting that women do in this society is not the best way to raise children or treat women who mother.

undertaking of motherhood is, how much she had had to do to keep me alive and to love and care for me. I couldn’t believe I had so little idea of what child-rearing entailed: that it is a doing, rather than a being, and a doing around the clock, without end. She had a life before me! She was a person before me! I considered this, really, for the first time.

I hadn’t realized that it is unlikely that after pregnancy a woman will ever return to pre-birth fitness. I didn’t know how profoundly pregnancy affects the body, from cardiac

where a family member – a mother or sister, usually – would come and stay for a number of months, seemed to adapt better to matrescence than I did,

New mothers spend significant time alone – around 38 per cent spend more than eight hours alone each day, according to one study – which doesn’t seem at all ideal for a species that relies on social contact for health, wellbeing and survival, and on social learning for development.12

Other reviewers found the causes of loneliness include a lack of recognition of the difficulties of being a mother, the burden of childcare, and an absence of community and social networks.

My husband had a busy work period and I was tired of pacing the streets, trying to settle into these new skills, this new solitude, this frightening new existence.

I had started to misspeak with sleep deprivation. Every day hurt.

Sleep deprivation is different to feeling tired. It’s like being underwater, in a new state, another element.

These days of exhaustion were frightening: they didn’t feel safe. On the floor, playing with her, I would feel myself wanting desperately to fall asleep.

night-time shift work as a ‘probable carcinogen’ because the evidence that links sleep deprivation and cancer is so strong. The

In the United States, the military was still using sleep deprivation in 2004, although detainees were supposed to be given ‘four hours of continuous sleep every 24 hours’.5 This is more than many mothers will regularly get in the first year of looking after a new baby.

We are all physically and emotionally dependent on sleep. Sleep loss inflicts devastating effects on every part of the human

Sleep deprivation even impacts DNA and learning-related genes in the brain involved in memory-making.

People who get too little sleep have overactive sympathetic nervous systems, which can cause damage throughout the body. Crucially, it attacks the heart and degrades cardiovascular health. It also shuts down surges of healing growth hormones, which are more active at night. In a survey I conducted among new mothers, sleep deprivation was voted the most emotionally challenging aspect of new motherhood,

There is limited evidence about the long-term effects of sleep deprivation, because, says Walker, ‘We feel it morally unacceptable to impose that state on humans – and increasingly, on any species.’7 Except new mothers.

Crucially, there is plenty of evidence that social support also plays a major role in protecting

We need to acknowledge that pregnant women and new mothers are highly vulnerable to mental illness.

why are we sending a high-risk group off to spend an unknown period of time at home alone, where they must look after vulnerable infants and recover from the trauma of giving birth, while burdened with loneliness, lack of sleep, and a shedload of impossible cultural expectations, including the imperative to enjoy every minute of it? Are these the actions of a responsible or functional society?

The only thing which seems to me to be eternal and natural in motherhood is ambivalence and its manifestation in the ever ongoing cycles of separation and unification with our children.

blue-grey pallor,

2021, an article in the International Handbook of Love took a severe, decidedly mid-century view of maternal ambivalence, stating that it ‘may contribute to profound, lifelong implications for maternal and child mental health’.

‘Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways,’ is a quote commonly attributed to Freud.)

Unsurprisingly, ‘intensive mothering’, which is now both studied and practised across the industrialized world, is associated with poor maternal mental health, stress and parental burnout.

Mothers would not have had the company and assistance of grandmothers, sisters, aunts and younger children so readily – and this scattering of families has continued with globalization. Even quite recently, when my grandmother had her first baby in Scotland in the 1940s, two of her sisters-in-law moved in to help, but this would be unheard of now.

Undoubtedly, scientific-information sharing and the development of medicine led to huge successes in the reduction of infant mortality, but, in giving primacy to the opinions of mostly male doctors, a collective reservoir of women’s wisdom, knowledge, involvement and empathy – as well as self-determination and freedom of thought – was slowly emptied.

It is remarkable that the majority of the world’s so-called developed nations neglect these basic facts of human need.

Saying sorry to children, in the culture I grew up in, would have been anathema and seen as confusing for the child. Today, parents are encouraged to apologize if they lose it and show their impatience.

A positive alternative to authoritarian parenting, perhaps, but it also adds to the mental load on, yes, mothers.

Looking after a new human necessarily requires self-sacrifice which, inevitably, limits and shrinks one’s sense of self. She needed my full attention. So I put myself to one side.

felt society and culture were telling me – that this was not valuable work (although you have to get it totally right) – was bewildering. ‘It’s the most important job in the world, with no manual, no instructions, and you have to keep this baby alive. You don’t know how to change a nappy, how to feed them, and yet you have this huge responsibility,’