Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

by Lucy Jones

Over the past couple of years I have found myself increasingly drawn to the fluidity of the woods, and the abstruse fluidity of slime molds—an organism with 720 sexes.[5] To the complex relationships between lichen and moss and bacteria and spores and fungi and mycelium and trees and decaying matter and dead wood and frass. The complex life-processes and “intelligence” of these organisms expand my perception of life and help me see our wider ecologies more clearly.

Women and love are underpinnings. Examine them and you threaten the very structure of culture. Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

Pregnancy, then birth, and then—big-time—early motherhood simply did not match up with the cultural, social and philosophical narratives I had grown up with.

I started to realize that my mind had been colonized by inadequate ideas about womanhood, about motherhood, about value, even love: there was canker in the roots of my habitat.

I had been fundamentally misinformed about the female body and maternal experience

Rich made clear that it was the sociocultural institution of motherhood, not the children themselves, that oppressed women and could even mutilate the relationship between mother and child.

there was a “vacuum in the evidence base” in research on postnatal depression, the primary mental illness associated with motherhood.[5]

In the West, when a child is born, the announcement would be “a child is born.” The Tikopia would say, instead, “a woman has given birth.” The Tikopia have a sense of the newborn mother.[7]

New-born mother

“The critical transition period which has been missed is MATRESCENCE, the time of mother-becoming,” writes Raphael. “During this process, this rite of passage, changes occur in a woman’s physical state, in her status within the group, in her emotional life, in her focus of daily activity, in her own identity, and in her relationships with all those around her.”[8]

Everyone knows adolescents are uncomfortable and awkward because they are going through extreme mental and bodily changes, but, when they have a baby, women are expected to transition with ease—to breeze into a completely new self, a new role, at one of the most perilous and sensitive times in the life course.

twenty-first-century parenting norms, which had become much more intensive, child-centered and demanding than they ever had been before. These norms, combined with neoliberal economic policy, the erosion of community and the requirement for most families to have two incomes to live because of the ever-higher cost of living, were leading to staggering levels of tension, guilt and ill health among mothers.

Globally, the prevalence of postnatal depression is 17 percent. With two billion mothers in the world, this means over 350 million women experience perinatal mental health problems. The likelihood of depressive episodes doubles during this period, compared with other times in a woman’s life.[11] This figure rises for women of color, those in disadvantaged socioeconomic groups who face systemic health inequalities, and women who have experienced loss (miscarriage, stillbirth, neonatal death or a child taken into care).[12],[13],[14] Suicide is the leading cause of death in women in the perinatal period between six weeks and one year after giving birth in the UK.[15] Clearly, this is a grave situation.

In 2022, a study by researchers at Ohio State University found that 66 percent of parents met the criteria for burnout, where stress and exhaustion overwhelm the ability to cope and function.[22]

why. I wanted to find out how much maternal mental illness was inevitable and how much might be avoided through improved treatment and care—through a fairer society. To what extent was postnatal mental illness intrinsic and biological, and how much of it was an understandable response to the design of modern parenthood? Why was motherhood in my society so dangerous for women’s mental health and well-being? I suspected that the rise in perinatal mood “disorders” must be telling us something important about the way we live. Unlike other cultures, which treat becoming a mother as a major, traumatic life crisis, with special social rites and rituals, Western societies had been failing to recognize matrescence as a major transition: a transition that involves a whole spectrum of emotional and existential ruptures, a transition that can make women ill, a transition in which the mother, as well as the baby, could be celebrated. We had been failing to care for mothers, or for one another, very well at all.

!

Nor is the work of mothering an exclusively female activity. Men mother. Grandparents mother. People without their own children mother. However, women still do most of the caregiving in the society I live in, especially in the early years, and I am interested in the particular cultural and social gendered expectations and pressures on female parents, and women socialized as female, so I use the word “mother” more frequently than “parent.”

Love this distinction

I was taught in science lessons at school that sperm are released and race each other until the fittest and fastest sperm wins and penetrates the egg; a retelling of the hero myth, essentially, with the egg as the passive vessel. In fact, we know now that this isn’t what happens at all. Sperm cells are immature when they arrive in the vagina. Then women’s oviduct cells secrete chemicals which mature the sperm and allow it to swim. Instead of the sperm poking the egg like a needle, the egg actually enfolds the sperm and the two cells melt into one.

What does it mean to be pregnant at the most ecologically destructive time in human history?

Compelling women to motherhood, to pregnancy, to childbirth is only possible in a world where those in power—namely men—are catastrophically ignorant about the health and mortality risks and vulnerability of pregnancy, and the reality of birthing and raising children—and deeply, cruelly indifferent to the health, dignity and survival of women.

Just like the desire to write: a desire to live self from within, a desire for the swollen belly, for language, for blood. We are not going to refuse, if it should happen to strike our fancy, the unsurpassed pleasures of pregnancy which have actually been always exaggerated or conjured away—or cursed—in the classic texts. For if there’s one thing that’s been repressed, here’s just the place to find it: in the taboo of the pregnant woman. Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa

I was being exposed to hormones that my body had never experienced before, some that didn’t even have a name. Science had so ignored and overlooked the female body, not to mention the pregnant body, that it was hard to get a handle on what was happening. At the time, I had no idea that a number of hormones had increased in levels by 200 or 300 times. The tiredness was unlike anything I had experienced before. I would get home from work and immediately fall into a thick sleep on the sofa. Turns out it’s quite a thing growing another person. Who knew?

me. “She feels herself vast as this world; but this very opulence annihilates her, she feels that she herself is no longer anything,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir of pregnancy, managing to describe the experience with uncanny precision.[3]

Indeed, I would discover that in Freud’s twenty-three volumes of work there are only around thirty mentions of pregnancy.

I imagine it could have been, as the French philosopher Julia Kristeva writes, that “I am at the border of my condition as a living being,” and this threshold state can be horrifying or sickening, for it reminds us of our corporeal reality, or, in other words, death.[7]

“On a deep unconscious level, the pregnant woman hovers between internal and external worlds, at a crossroads of past, present and future; self and other.”

Raphael-Leff offered me a language to describe the “emotional disequilibrium” and the reactivation of “dormant conflicts.”[8] She developed the idea of the “emotional placenta,” where internal images and unconscious historical facts are the nutrients or poisons that influence the “mental gestation” of pregnancy.[9] She normalized the internal distractions which disrupt the “ordinary illusion of unified identity and indivisibility.” Looking back on the anxiety I felt, and the need for reassurance and monitoring, Raphael-Leff’s concept of “internal badness”—the mother’s fear about her own moral shortcomings and whether the baby would be able to withstand them—was illuminating.[10]

As I considered the daughter within me, long-forgotten senses, fears and feelings bubbled up. I looked at the predictions of climate breakdown and biodiversity collapse with a new intensity of alarm. She would be my age in 2047. How much of the Earth would still be habitable then?

Twenty-first-century biology is fundamentally different from twentieth-century biology. It is a biology of relationships rather than entities. The biology of anatomic individualism that had been the basis of genetics, anatomy, physiology, evolution, developmental biology, and immunology has been shown to be, at best, a weak first approximation of nature. Scott Gilbert, “Rethinking Parts and Wholes”

During pregnancy, cells are exchanged between the mother and fetus via the placenta. When the baby is born, some of those cells remain intact in the mother’s body. For decades.[1] Perhaps forever. The phenomenon is called microchimerism. The exchange creates what the leading geneticist Dr. Diana Bianchi calls a “permanent connection which contributes to the survival of both individuals.” Cells have been found in subsequent siblings, too. If you have a younger brother or sister, they may have your cells within them, and, if they are older, their cells may be within you. Maternal cells also remain in the child. Dr. Bianchi and her team also found that a live birth was not required for a woman to “become a chimera,” meaning an organism containing cells from two or more individuals. Women who have miscarried will likely carry fetal cells within them.

Before pregnancy, I was wary of any fetishization of the “natural.” I was aware that “natural” as a label was a misnomer, frequently used to sell products or to promote nostalgic yearning, rather than to refer to anything real or tangible. I liked evidence, data and research. I was suspicious of ideology, of fantasies that concealed old lies. But I also wanted a birth that I could control in some way. So I was attracted to the idea of a “natural birth” without pain relief. Looking back, now, I realize how potent the ideology is, and how it intersects powerfully with broader ideas about how women should be and behave, and what they should tolerate.

But real choice and autonomy are beyond reach for many women today, as the birth experience is obscured by myths and half-truths.

The idea that birth could be a calm, gentle, even transcendental experience is seductive; it was very seductive to me. Assuming an upright position for labor, rather than being stuck on my back, made sense. Claiming agency in the birthing room, rather than passively awaiting interventions, was attractive. But there was more to it than that. An uncritical embrace of “natural childbirth” has led birth discourse too far into the realms of myth and misinformation, and birthing women into a place of silence and shame. The understandable aim of giving women and birthing people choice, autonomy and agency has unfortunately been distorted by misogynistic ideas about women and pain. The truth is simply that birth really hurts for most women.

Childbirth has become a site for the sacred and that is understandable. It offers a means of connecting with the ritual events of human history. There is great power in birth, and many women do find it empowering. But there is a point at which the absence of information becomes manipulative.

I felt dismayed by the expectations I had held, as I realized how false and ideologically motivated they were. I had been misled. This was, I could see, partly a failure of language. 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, even within the spaces where talking about tearing vaginas should happen. Remembering the moment when the pain was most severe, I felt furious. Angry that I hadn’t been warned. And even though the physical suffering was over, the subsequent silence was a new, lasting violence.

What we have come to accept as “normal” birth is, in fact, deeply disturbing for many women.

Early neuroscientific research on humans is now showing that caregiver brains experience significant plasticity, even without the experience of pregnancy. Hands-on caring shapes brain circuitry and causes other biological changes. In 2020, a groundbreaking study showed that having a baby changes a father’s brain anatomy.[16] The brains of men were studied before their partners became pregnant and after the baby was born. First-time fathers showed a significant reduction in cortical volume and thickness. The higher the volume reduction, the stronger the father’s brain responses to pictures of his baby. Other studies found that the hands-on time a father spends with an infant, and even how affectionate he is, is associated with different hormonal and neural changes, such as the reduction of testosterone, and increases in oxytocin and the level of activity in the brain’s reward systems.[17],[18]

Studies of brain activity in fathers in heterosexual partnerships, gay fathers and nonbiological parents show that the adult caregiving brain is highly adaptive and will change in response to the demands of an infant. Many of the neurobiological mechanisms associated with nurturing in mothers—the presence of oxytocin, prolactin, vasopressin—are also present in fathers and non-birthing parents.

In A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother, published in 2001, Rachel Cusk depicted the “psychical events” of childbirth and early motherhood, with all its ambivalence and pressure.[16] The fallout from the book was significant. Cusk was vilified. In an article written years afterwards for the Guardian, entitled “I was only being honest,” she defends herself and critiques the damning reviews of the book. “I was accused of child-hating, of postnatal depression, of shameless greed, of irresponsibility, of pretentiousness, of selfishness, of doom-mongering and, most often, of being too intellectual,” she writes.[17] Sections of her memoir were picked out by reviewers to make a case that she was a “bad mother.”

“People disown dangerous feelings.” On the pressure of conformity in new motherhood she says, “anyone who complains is ejected.”[18]

Before my matrescence, I had thought that I could be a woman who “had it all.” I thought that my husband and I were pretty much the same: that we could both work and care for our children. I was suspicious of maternalism and biological essentialism, having grown up in an all-boys boarding school where I became aware of the limiting and distorting effects of patriarchy and gender stereotypes for both boys and girls. Reading Germaine Greer, Shulamith Firestone and Simone de Beauvoir as a young teen reinforced this view. Though I’d always dreamed of having children, motherhood itself didn’t interest me. It was, in fact, almost completely absent from my early feminist education. When I entered matrescence, I realized it was a major female experience where feminism has failed. There seemed to be a distinct biological—as well as a sociological—reality to contend with; one that took me by surprise.

The problem is not the needs and requirements of young children. The problem is having to strive for an ideal within societal conditions that make meeting it impossible. Ultimately, the intensive mothering ideology serves those benefiting from the gender gap, those with money and power: in a society with a focus on competition, capital and accumulation, optimizing children fits right into neoliberal economics. There is an unnecessary, insidious cruelty to the societal construction of motherhood. An “invisible violence,” as Adrienne Rich puts it.

To destroy the institution is not to abolish motherhood. It is to release the creation and sustenance of life into the same realm of decisional struggle, surprise, imagination and conscious intelligence, as any difficult, but freely chosen work. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born

As I tried to reorient myself, I realized how much of my angst had emanated from an existential crisis. Not in the clichéd sense that I couldn’t find meaning in my life; rather, that the weight of my choices and responsibilities, combined with a new, sustained confrontation with mortality, was bamboozling. This was a world tilted.

“Some people think of an existential crisis as a literal threat to existence, and in some sense it is,” she explained, when we talked. “Mortality is very much there for women. But I also talk about it using crisis from the Greek crisis (κρίσις), to choose or to decide. Everything has to be chosen again. What is important to them? How are they going to mother? How are they going to incorporate this identity of mother into themselves?” Through the lens of existential thought, it seems inevitable that many women should find the transition to motherhood challenging, even madness-invoking. “The burden of responsibility” is at the heart of existentialism: Sartre argued that we are “condemned” to individual freedom because, “once thrown into the world,” we are responsible for everything we do. Keeping a baby alive, making decisions for another person, is surely the ultimate fraught pinnacle of responsibility.

Academics are starting to consider the positive possibilities for change that matrescence may bring. Writing in Philosophical Inquiries into Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Mothering Maternal Subjects, the philosopher Brooke Schueneman describes becoming a mother as a time of “substantial imagination and self-exploration” that has been neglected and obscured. She argues that according to the Socratic, Platonist and Hellenistic assertion of philosophy as a way of learning how to die in order to live more fully, mothers are in a “prime position to embrace this ancient, but relevant, exercise.” “Many women report their experiences as paradigm shifts from being self-centred to collective, or just the opposite, from other-centred to self-centred; from being free to burdened; as lacking to fulfilled,” she writes.[13]

Experiencing matrescence has helped me see how badly we need new, informal ecologies of care—how we need to repair our sense of community and connectedness across society.

They call it love, we call it unpaid labour. Silvia Federici, Wages Against Housework

For the decade before matrescence, which began when I had lived for thirty years, my central daily purpose had been, above all, to earn money through work. Before that, from the time my conscious memories formed, my purpose was, I understood, to learn, to pass exams with the highest possible marks, to excel, to achieve so that I could one day get a good job and salary. I needed to prove I wasn’t stupid; I needed not to fail. My achievements were valuable: the exams I passed, the job I got, the paycheck I earned, the conventions I conformed to, the items I could acquire. I was encouraged towards a creative life in childhood, but the cultural messaging around me was limiting and loud. I was a child when the prime minister was Margaret Thatcher, whose work pattern included surviving on four hours’ sleep a night. There was no such thing as society and greed was good. I was schooled in competition and the pressure to win and improve and optimize. By the time I entered the workplace my industrial psyche had been formed. Work happened from Monday to Friday, often for twelve hours a day. My body became machinelike, trained in the rhythms of the working week. I had to earn money, and aim to earn more and more. What do you do? I would ask the people I met, by which I meant, what do you do for work? When I wasn’t earning, my focus was on relationships: maintaining friendships and romantic attachments, spending time and money building social connections, learning to be kind and agreea...

It was strange, then, when I fell through the portal of motherhood, to feel that these central drives—to work, to earn, to self-actualize—were now, as soon as the baby left my womb, out of place and even immoral. Why, then, was I sent to school and university? Why was I told “You Can Do Anything”? For a game of dress-up? Why the pretense that I could live my life like a man? Or that being a woman counted for something other than maternal duties once you had a baby? Something snapped shut. I was trapped and bound, suddenly, by new bars of restrictive and prescriptive gender norms.

In matrescence, I felt a strange but strong pressure to pretend that I a) wasn’t really working much, b) didn’t want to work, and c) only worked because our household financial needs required it, not because I found fulfillment outside of motherhood, as I had for my previous decades of existence. It was this desire for fulfillment elsewhere that seemed abhorrent and stigmatized in my new context.

Casting care work as easy work that anyone can do alone is a way of justifying the undervaluation, and underpayment, of carers. By naturalizing the work of caregiving and raising children, society can obscure and mystify what it actually is: the infrastructure propping up capitalism. Without workers, there is no work. The largest section of our economies is actually unpaid labor. In 2016, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) found that the value of unpaid childcare—mothering, fathering, parenting—was £351.7 billion. Overall, unpaid household service work was equivalent to 63.1 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).[3]