Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

by Lucy Jones

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.

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