Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

by Lucy Jones

Sorry this Write up sucks I’m still mentally totally a wreck after baby for some reason. Like my iq is down about 50 points and words seem weirdly difficult lol.

At the time, I couldn’t fathom exactly where I’d picked up these ideas, but it became clear, once the baby was born, that I felt that self-sacrifice was an essential component of being a good mother. My past independence had to end, and I would now need to live to serve others in an intensive and ultimately self-sacrificing way.

I would soon learn that caregiving was much, much harder, more confronting, exciting, creative, beautiful, stressful, alarming, rewarding, tedious, transformative, enlivening and (occasionally) deadening than I imagined, and much more essential to a working society than we give it credit for.

The experience of giving birth had been bamboozling. I was attracted by the idea of a “natural” birth, and I believed what I’d heard and read: that, if I was relaxed and used my mantras and positive affirmations, I wouldn’t feel too much pain, and everything would be fine. This was not the case.

I knew nothing about the emotional and psychological transition that follows birth. I had no idea that something was happening to my brain—that it was literally changing shape. I had no idea what was coming: the anxiety, the life-exploding romance, the guilt, the transcendence, the terror, the psychedelia, the loss of control, the rupture of self.

“Instead of focusing on the woman’s identity transition, more research is focused on how the baby turns out. But a woman’s story, in addition to how her psychology impacts her parenting, is important to examine, too.”

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.

“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.

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.

living world. With this book I hope to begin new conversations about how becoming a mother changes a person, about what it means to metamorphose, about what we can do to recognize new mothers in their matrescence and how we can reimagine the institution of motherhood.

I was me, but not me. I was two.

being was one of the most enlivening, wild and interesting experiences of my life.

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.”

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. “Natural” childbirth can end in clitoral tears, sepsis, rectoceles, fistulas and psychosis.

I realized, too, that warnings about the dangers of epidurals were overblown. I felt, in some ways, a fool. Had I accepted the agony of childbirth without pain relief because I thought it was my due suffering, as a woman? Was this some kind of quasi-religious masochism, or deep-seated lack of self-respect and esteem?

I couldn’t believe my eyes. I couldn’t sleep for the beauty of her. Little pink mouth. Doughball cheeks. Plant-stalk soft bones. Her astral holiness. Body of my body, flesh of my flesh.

Outside the context of being exposed to their infants, they found evidence that motherhood tunes the brain to be “more flexible, responsive and efficient.”[5]

The “cognitive load” of adapting and adjusting to the needs of a growing child and adult over time may constitute an “enriching environment” which makes the brain more resilient.

Instead, the lead author, Hoekzema, explained to me, volume loss can show a “fine-tuning of connections.” Synaptic reorganization and fine-tuning, it is thought, make the brain more efficient and streamlined in what it needs to do to care for a baby.

is the first neuroscience work that speaks directly to the hard-to-describe sense of change that mothers experience: the sense that the self has become something new, that the old identity is over.

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

Middle-aged and older women who have had children show less brain aging and cognitive decline than those who have not given birth—and

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 practical support from a partner, family and non-family relationships, support from coworkers, support with routine home duties such as watching children, traditional rituals, reassurance of worth and companionship.

The baby might just be finding being in the world, and growing in the world, stressful, and all she could do was cry, even if all her obvious needs were met. It might mean that she was simply processing the world, and the rapid changes within, and crying was the only way to communicate.

As the months passed, it dawned on me that my mother went through a lot to give birth to me, and then to look after me as an infant, and then to raise me through childhood.

I started to see her in a new way. I was glimpsing how much vaster and harder the 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.

Maybe there was no truth, no single way of raising a healthy baby, of being a good mother. Maybe I should stop reading so many parenting books.

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

According to Freud, ambivalence is at the heart of, well, the human heart. In psychoanalytic thought, ambivalence means the existence of conflicting feelings.

“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? They should stop saying you’re complete now and you’ve got everything you ever wanted. That’s capitalism I’m pretty sure and whoever makes money off selling baby shit.”

In her research and her studies of new mothers, she found that in all the four dimensions of existence—physical, social, personal and spiritual—women were facing huge changes.

For Arnold-Baker, as for so many others, the solution is trying to normalize it: to “acknowledge the enormity of what actually happens to women and help them to understand how they have changed in all of these ways and what that struggle means and that the response they are having is normal to that experience.”

Creativity “helps build self-esteem and validate a woman’s perspective. It also brings the often-hidden nature of motherhood into the open.”

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. In these years of caring, our vulnerability becomes so stark. I thought mothering would just be changing diapers and cuddling a baby.

Instead it took me to the edge of what it means to be human. It tested my empathy to the limit, it challenged me intellectually, it required me to answer and ask questions constantly, to consider metaphysics and the origins of matter. I learned how to talk to pre-verbal humans. How to listen and respond with sounds and noises and breath. The language was tone of voice, skin color, pace of movement, facial expression, heat, clinginess, small bodily movements like rubbing eyes or ears or a faraway stare. The language grew and altered daily. I learned how to subtly reel in and out a presence when the baby was learning something new: delicately using my hands and fingers and arms to support climbing at an inch remove without their knowing that my hands and arms were right there. I became a kind of doctor and a nurse, learning essential pediatric health and medicine: what rashes are what, the healthy temperature of skin, signs of infection or the hatching of it. I had to learn a new language for each child. I learned how to be a shock absorber or airbag between my young children with their underdeveloped prefrontal cortexes and inner wildness, their appetites for destruction and the rest of the world. I learned what it’s like to feel two conflicting things at the same time: to want to see my friends and have time away, but also never to want to leave for very long. I was both vulnerable and newly strengthened. My reflexes had never been quicker. Sometimes the baby might fall of...

matrescence was associated with enhanced knowledge, skills and capacity. They found evidence that it “strengthened women’s mindset, willpower, and overall emotional intelligence.”[7]

They had no time for self-doubt. They were exactly who they wanted to be. They wanted to move! They wanted to dance! To touch. To laugh! They needed me to be in the present and give them a stream of immediate experiences, and so I fell in love with the world again.

They showed me how life could encompass play. I had lost touch with how it felt to be in a body, to horse around, to live through the senses. My creativity-for-the-sake-of-it had gone underground but they unearthed it. They taught me how to glory in the simple pleasures of being a sensuous creature alive on Earth.

“If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.”[5]