Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

by Lucy Jones

After childhood and adolescence, there is no other time in an adult human’s life course which entails such dramatic psychological, social and physical change.

Almost half a century later, we still barely acknowledge the psychological and physiological significance of becoming a mother: how it affects the brain, the endocrine system, cognition, immunity, the psyche, the microbiome, the sense of self.

Here, I realized, were the results of 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.

Despite being the richest country in the world, the US is the most dangerous place in the developed world to be pregnant and give birth, with a disgracefully high maternal mortality rate (238 per every 100,000 live births).

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.

She will live for many years, I hope, when I have returned to the ground. She will live on the earth when I am gone. Time bends.

Perhaps the cultural obsession with “natural” birth reflects the extent of our detachment from our bodies and from the Earth. We are so disconnected from the rest of the natural world that we don’t know what “nature” is: bodies failing, cuckoos pushing eggs out of nests, a weirdly small human pelvis and a big infant head, illness and disease, shit and blood, ticks and cockroaches. “Natural childbirth” in the “natural world” often ends in infant or maternal death.

It’s a paradox. Society wants women to breastfeed, but doesn’t want to see them doing it.

Even if we had had a hard day, leaving me worn out by the crying, a whole night without her would feel too long. Even when I thought I couldn’t get up again in the night, after fractions and snatches of sweaty sleep, my body could do it. I found new pools of strength, of addictive love.

In the early months of her life outside the womb, it started to become clear that she had never completely left my body. I felt her as I had when she was physically inside me, but in a different, more carnal way. It made more sense when I discovered that my brain had changed beyond recognition.

In a landmark study published in Nature in 2016, researchers led by Elseline Hoekzema, a neuroscientist from the Netherlands, and Erika Barba-Müller, a neuroscientist working in Spain, provided evidence, for the first time, that pregnancy renders pronounced, consistent changes in brain structure.[8]

But I knew that this wasn’t right; my female ancestors hadn’t mothered this way, alone and indoors.

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. Jane Lazarre, The Mother Knot

Underwater, I began coming back to myself. Filling up. No one could get to me here, in this other element. I couldn’t help anyone while I was under the water. As I floated, making a star shape with my body, I started to remember. This is who I am, or once was, or might be again.

I am so lucky; I have everything I’ve ever wanted and every day is hard.

“I wish I’d known how difficult it actually is being a mother. I wish I had more understanding towards other mothers.”

“Insipid/idealistic portrayals of motherhood made me less interested in it as a young person. I thought it was boring when it’s one of the most extreme socio-political experiences I have ever been through.”

“Whoever runs the baby industry and makes you think you should be happy and complete after the baby comes, that is bullshit. They should stop telling you congratulations and start saying, are you OK? And what do you need?

a new discourse of motherhood emerged that made two things inevitable: that women would forever feel inadequate as mothers and that work and motherhood would be forever seen as in conflict and incompatible.

And I found being away from her in the early years physically uncomfortable in a way my husband did not.

Mothers spend twice as much time looking after their children every day compared with the 1960s, while also working more. Men today do about as much care work as women did fifty years ago.[29]

I could not only be me—whatever that was—but somebody actually needed me to be that…If you listen to [your children], somehow you are able to free yourself from baggage and vanity and all sorts of things, and deliver a better self, one that you like. The person that was in me that I liked best was the one my children seemed to want. Toni Morrison

I tried to explain to my husband why I couldn’t concentrate but it was difficult to articulate. A part of me feels like it should be with the children, so I can’t fully give myself to work. I am entangled. When I work, there is most often a low-level hum of discomfort, unless they are asleep, unconscious.

Care work is hardcore. It is life-and-death work. It is fevers and risk and birth and illness and screaming and love and transference. It is transformation and hope. It is quick thinking and deep patience. It is resentment and anger. It is sacrifice and gift.

But for the majority of mothers, working conditions are in direct conflict with family life.

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.

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.

Still, there is a shadow, a shudder of growing redundancy, a reminder of the paradox that my job is to make it possible for her to leave me, to walk away from our present intimacy and form her own life. My children are the main actors, and I am the audience. I will always be in thrall to them, but they won’t always be in thrall to me. And I won’t always be able to watch over them, to keep them safe in my protection. This intimacy has a shelf life. Already, it hurts. I feel a premonition as I watch them grow before my eyes. This is life, and it is hard, and it is right.