Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

by Lucy Jones

The way GDP is calculated obscures reality and penalizes caregivers. In our society, wages, benefits and access to resources are all tied to economic output—unless it is the caregiving kind. (The problems with GDP are multiple. The measure doesn’t include the costs of degradation of human habitats worldwide, environmental degradation or the harm inflicted on people across the world in terrible working conditions.)

Framing unpaid care work as a source of individual personal satisfaction conceals the fact that it is also a public good with immense social benefits. Children grow up to pay taxes, work for public services, support the older generation, repay public debt, keep society going. It is easy to see why there has been a reluctance to recognize the immense challenges and demands of maternal work. It makes it easy to pay less for it, or nothing. It makes it possible for men and employers to “free ride on voluntary contributions to the production and maintenance of human and social capital,” as the American economist Nancy Folbre puts it.[4] As she writes, “The true cost of inequality is obscured by national income accou...

Working culture hasn’t caught up with women needing and wanting to work, nor allowed fathers adequate opportunities to take up caring responsibilities and equalize the division of labor. Men aren’t yet shouldering their fair share of obligations and women still drive the economy through reproductive work. This is, as Silvia Federici and other feminists have put it, the “capitalist organization of the reproduction of the workforce.”

The way we approach reproductive labor—the way we treat mothering bodies and minds—is similar to the way we destroy the living world, habitats, human life, and health and well-being, in the fetish for growth at any cost. We do it all in the service of an extractivist capitalism which uses and exploits “public goods”—human and nonhuman life, in other words—in order to confer advantages and power to those at the top.

What else does reproduction in the Capitalocene look like?

It doesn’t have to be this way. Some countries in the Global North do value caregiving. In Berlin, there are family centers in every neighborhood. In Sweden, parents can stay home with a sick child for up to 120 days a year until children turn twelve. In Finland, both mothers and fathers receive nearly seven months of paid leave.

In Norway, use-it-or-lose-it periods of paid leave dispel the stigma fathers experience if they want to take time off work to care for their families. In Denmark, and some other countries, childcare in the early years is state-subsidized (while the UK has the second-most-expensive childcare in the world).[13] These policies place value on nurturing and rearing children—and they make citizens happier. Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark consistently top the charts of the happiest countries in the UN’s World Happiness Report.

But in most affluent nations in the West, relationships of nurture are not seen as contributing to the public good, so it is convenient if they can be kept invisible, with mothers engaged in unpaid, private, solitary labor, raising the future citizens who,...

In these intimate relationships with my children, the way I relate to people and to myself has been newly revealed to me. The past returns: the scrape of armbands removed from an arm, the lemon-pine smell of hedgerow leaves and shrubs at adult knee height, the dried-out film of a dead snail, the bright white sap in a dandelion stalk, the warm smell of swimming pools, the scent of my mother’s navy mohair cardigan. Maybe this could be the beginning of a do-over, an edit, a new version. Maybe I can meet myself as a child or teenager and be kinder, less critical, less afraid of painful emotions. Maybe, through caring for my children, through the deep satisfaction of making, with their father, a harbor of love, I can find a healthier and more compassionate relationship to myself, and change how I imagine the world.

Times of transformation, whatever they might be, are opportunities to find new connectedness; to choose and consolidate the things that matter; to bring repressed selves out of the shadows into the light; to forgive; to grow layers of nacre, of resilience, of acceptance.

Carl Jung has become one of my wayfinders; his work a map as I orient myself in this transformation. He believed that individuation—the process of becoming a whole person, of maturing—happened throughout a person’s life rather than just in adolescence. I have found this framing a useful and empowering way of thinking about matrescence. Even if it is painful, lonely and frightening, writes Marchiano, mothering is one of life’s great opportunities. She describes it as a crucible in which the dross can be burned off and the wilder, more authentic self remains. “Mothering can be like being thrown down a deep well,” she says.[3] At the bottom, I realized how puny my understanding of the world was—I don’t know anything at all! I have no idea who I am!—and that was, eventually, liberating. I could construct my life again.

Crucially, motherhood can itself be a vehicle of social change, as well as a sphere of individual transformation. Mothers are overlooked in history but, as the writer Anna Malaika Tubbs shows in her book Three Mothers, about the mothers of James Baldwin, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, mothers are the first teachers, the first leaders, the first caretakers. As the writer Angela Garbes argues in her book Essential Labor, motherhood can be a kind of creative rebellion. There is power in parenting that teaches children to challenge the harms of the status quo.

In the anthology Revolutionary Mothering, a group of mothers and academics posed the question: “How do we get from a conservative definition of mothering as a biological destiny to mothering as a liberating practice that can thwart runaway capitalism?”[8] In the United States, the Marshall Plan for Moms is a national movement to “center mothers in our economic recovery from the pandemic and value their labor” by calling for affordable childcare, paid family leave and equal pay.[9] Concurrently, the “reparenting” or “intergenerational trauma healing” movement is rising within different cultures. Leslie Priscilla Arreola-Hillenbrand, a first-generation non-Black Chicana mother in the US, founded the Latinx parenting movement, which works to end “Chancla culture.” La Chancla refers to a flip-flop or sandal which has been used by Latina mothers to discipline children, either by use or by threat.

We need to reorganize the working world. This would mean ending the “motherhood penalty,” the phrase used by sociologists to describe the systemic disadvantages to women in the workplace when they have a child. These include disparities in pay, benefits, promotions and perceived competence (which makes up 80 percent of the gender pay gap), as well as pension inequality and pension penalties for part-time employment.[16] We need to end discrimination against pregnant women and women returning from maternity leave. We need truly flexible working for fathers and mothers. We need top-down policies and incentives that allow men to parent more while working, including part-time contracts and flexible hours. Crucially, we need much more investment in quality early-years childcare. We need to ask: Why do one in ten nursery workers live in poverty?[17] We need to pay caregivers according to their actual value, rather than the bogus and distorted market value that erodes the worth of care and love. We need benefits for carers such as carers’ leave for anyone in a caregiving role. We need longer paternity leave and, while we’re at it, we need to stop calling it “leave”: it’s not a holiday—it’s work. We need to look at shorter working weeks, shorter working days, a national living wage or care income. We need to weaken the pressure on men to be “ideal workers” in cultures of presenteeism. We must acknowledge reproductive labor by including care work in GDP.

It’s almost exactly six years since I became pregnant with my first child, and this story began, and I am a different creature to what I was before. A scientific paper has been published, the first of its kind, which shows that pregnancy-induced brain changes remain for at least six years after giving birth.[1] Researchers could identify whether or not a woman had been pregnant by looking at scans of their brains six years on, with 91.67 percent accuracy. A study published soon after found that mothers had larger areas of gray matter in their brains for decades. My brain hasn’t returned to the way it was before, and neither will I. It is possible, say the researchers, that the changes are permanent. I am settling in. Matrescence continues.

I am no longer dangerously sleep-deprived, nor is my sympathetic nervous system activated to an intolerable level every day. I am adapting to the responsibility, to the alteration of temporality, to the presence of mortality and risk, to the theme park of emotions, intense but fickle, to the constant buzz of potential horror, albeit lower now, to the truth of human vulnerability. I have had to throw out all my old shoes because my feet are a size bigger. My period is completely different: I bleed more, and my body ovulates aggressively, as if a starting gun has gone off. I am softer, and harder. The birth of my first child, after the maelstrom passed, was a deliverance. It brought me closer to my real self. I have learned how to surrender when I need to. I am learning to live in the rhythm of other lives; I have learned to share my life. I am trying to learn how to rest, so I can show my children it is important to rest, be, exist, not just to do. I am trying to accept help when it is offered. I can’t work myself to the bone anymore, or play fast and loose with my health, because I must look after them. A consequence: I must look after me. I seek wonder and awe in the woods, in the transcendent ordinary of moss and lichen on brick walls, through planting seeds in our garden, with friends I can talk honestly to, in a community project with neighbors to restore a small patch of amenity grass to a biodiverse wildflower meadow, in local community groups, in micro-awe. I have b...