Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

by Lucy Jones

And perhaps we’re sacralizing birth—the “ultimate phenomenon of a series of spiritual experiences,” as Dick-Read would have it—in order to meet a growing hunger for the numinous in an increasingly secular world.

In my arms, a collection of trillions of atoms that had cycled through generations of ancient supernova explosions.

heard the contraction and expansion of the universe bouncing into existence, new galaxies, axons, dendrites; cells and love, cells and love.

There is nothing in the Ten Commandments, I mean Steps, that directly addresses the mother’s health and well-being at this most vulnerable time.

Someone described it as similar to the effect of the joy-sucking dementors in Harry Potter, and I winced in recognition.

I began to realize that motherhood is a watching. I was, first and foremost, a sentinel. Her sentinel.

The changes are most prominently located in regions of the brain associated with theory of mind—the ability to understand and work out what someone else is thinking, feeling or needing.

Animal studies had already shown that babies become even more rewarding for mothers than cocaine, and this reward system is thought to trigger the drive to care and nurture.[11]

Together, these changes stimulate mothers “to progress from an individual with self-directed needs to being responsible for the care of another life.”[12] Orchard describes the process as the mother’s sense of self extending “a little further.”

When a mother cries, is it also developmental?

“The important thing to remember is that all emotion, either of pleasure or annoyance, must be banished, and a calm, wholly dispassionate attitude adopted which takes for granted the child will do what is expected of him.”

Maybe there was no truth, no single way of raising a healthy baby, of being a good mother.

“Trust Yourself: You know more than you think.” A little disingenuous, you might argue, considering what follows: in the latest edition, over 700 pages of detailed information.

“This is classic romantic nostalgia for the ‘noble savage’ arising in conditions of destabilizing social change.”[25]

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?”

“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.”

Becoming a mother had also forced me to face an inconvenient truth: that my time on Earth was limited, and my time with my baby, and then with my children, had an end point.

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.”

Nothing that I had previously read, heard or watched about motherhood suggested that it would be an intellectually stimulating, creative time.

The creativity started to effervesce when my daughter turned three.

required. She taught me how to slow down and pay attention, for a start.

“Enlisting natural history, myth, and ritual to explain anomalies, justify their actions, and reconcile necessity with emotions.”[8] How could I have thought this was not important and interesting work?

They “are the R&D department of the human species, the blue-sky guys, while we adults are production and marketing,” as Alison Gopnik, professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, says.[9] No snark, no cynicism, no sarcasm, no sniping. I wanted to be a blue-sky guy. My children were leading me back to the world of childhood.

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.

Children live in the moment, outside the marketplace. Their days are a constant remaking and creating and shedding and imagining. I live with a tiny Edward Lear, in a world of smumpy juice, bikstap, shax, hangangy, gookgooks, bafe. They invent words and questions and ideas I couldn’t dream of. I live with a small artist who draws made-up creatures every day. Their minds overflow with ideas and possibilities. They cherish the world; they cherish being alive.

It’s inequality of access to restorative natural areas, with children rarely playing in wild places.

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.

“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]

There is power in parenting that teaches children to challenge the harms of the status quo.

They all embrace a quietly radical idea: that recognizing suffering and truly repairing it is a creative, generative act.