Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

by Lucy Jones

Eventually, I encountered the concept of the “institution of motherhood,” developed by the feminist poet and essayist Adrienne Rich in her book Of Woman Born.[1] Writing in 1976, she showed how wider societal conditions—in a word, patriarchy—had turned motherhood into a “modern institution,” with its own rules, strictures and social expectations, all of which were designed to control women’s behavior and thought. Rich made clear that it was the sociocultural institution of motherhood, not the children themselves, that oppressed women and could even mutilate the relationship between mother and child.

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.

No one was talking about pain; about birth as an emotional process; about how it felt to have grown another human, to be two people at the same time, and then to be vacated, to push a person into being. 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.

I thought early motherhood would be gentle, beatific, pacific, tranquil: bathed in a soft light. But actually it was hard-core, edgy, gnarly. It wasn’t pale pink; it was brown of shit and red of blood. And it was the most political experience of my life, rife with conflict, domination, drama, struggle and power.

What was happening to my brain, my mind and my body? Why did it feel so wrong to be alone at home, mothering my young child? Why did it also feel so wrong to be away from her? Why did it seem as if my nervous system hadn’t evolved for this?

Despite the challenging symptoms, both physical and emotional, being in the closest possible physical relationship with another being was one of the most enlivening, wild and interesting experiences of my life.

I was different. I am different. On a cellular level. I would never be singular again.

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.

After childbirth, she “went owt of hir mende.” The Book of Margery Kempe (1436–38)

We spent the first few days in the house, marveling at our daughter. I was feeding around eighteen times in a twenty-four-hour period, sometimes for an hour each time. It’s going well, I thought, because she is latching on, though I was hallucinating and feeling odd, and she was crying a lot.

A friend sent over an expensive electric breast pump in a taxi for me to borrow. It sucked my breast into the tube, malforming the flesh into a sausage. It sounded alive, like a farmyard animal honking its last. The poet Camille T. Dungy described the experience best: “I felt like a nameless character in a science fiction movie where things end badly for the women.”[14]

The handful of times in the first couple of years when I was in another town or city, it was as if my intestines were stretched like elastic leading from me to her, over the fields and rivers and motorways and towns, and the farther away I was, or the longer I spent separated from her, the tauter and more nagging they became. Each time I returned, I was as desperate and panicked to get to her as if she were a ticking bomb I needed to defuse. I would run back to her down the road, jonesing, as if meeting a lover.

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.

“A distinct neural plasticity characterizes the female brain during this period, and dynamic structural and functional changes take place that accompany fundamental behavioural adaptations.” 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.”

I felt—and often feel—that I am physically addicted to my infant children, falling in love with them more deeply each day, and, as this research shows, in some ways, I am.

Looking back, I think my hyper-receptivity to external influences and social judgment may have been a result of the increased plasticity of my brain.

Baby needs Mummy, she said. If she’s crying, it’s because she needs you. She’s trying to communicate and needs picking up. She might be hungry, or need her diaper changing, hot or cold or needing a cuddle. Baby needs Mummy. Yes, yes, I trailed off, extinguishing the remaining tiny flame that my need for sleep could be of some importance.

4. I have been anxious or worried for no good reason No, not at all Hardly ever Yes, sometimes Yes, very often For no good reason? I looked up at the doctor. What did it mean, no good reason? I wanted to ask but didn’t. But really—I had a tiny baby to look after. Most days on my own. In a world facing climate chaos and extinction. That seemed like a good reason to me. Not to mention the dangers of bringing up a girl in a society that doesn’t properly condemn violence against women. Was that a good reason? This felt like a trick question. I was anxious and worried, but justifiably so. A life is in my hands and, as Winnicott said, if I get it wrong she will be “falling for ever…all kinds of disintegration…dying and dying and dying.”[1]

Governments have stopped using sleep deprivation as a technique of torture. In the United States, the military was still using sleep deprivation in 2004, although detainees were supposed to be given “four hours of continuous sleep every 24 hours.”[5] This is more than many mothers will regularly get in the first year of looking after a new baby.

Forty percent of women with postnatal depression have never had depression before, but may go on to have it again. Many, if not most, new mothers I know have had a significant systemic response to childbirth and becoming a parent, including the most life-threatening conditions: psychosis, sepsis, severe depression. I think of the woman with the clitoral tear, and the one with the bladder prolapse, and the rectal prolapse, and the fistula, and the suicidal ideation, and the bowel perforation, and the PTSD, and the psychiatric stays, and the one whose intestines fell out days after birth, and wonder: Why are we sending a high-risk group off to spend an unknown period of time at home alone, where they must look after vulnerable infants and recover from the trauma of giving birth, while burdened with loneliness, lack of sleep, and a shedload of impossible cultural expectations, including the imperative to enjoy every minute of it? Are these the actions of a responsible or functional society?

One of the problems with how Bowlby has been interpreted is that his clear emphasis on the role of society and community is ignored and forgotten: “Just as children are absolutely dependent on their parents for sustenance, so…are parents, especially their mothers, dependent on a greater society for economic provision. If a community values its children it must cherish their parents.”

Though I’d always dreamed of having children, motherhood itself didn’t interest me.

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]

Often those who have had more difficult home lives or relationships with parents seem to find becoming a parent more disorienting. “Being a mother may reawaken devastating feelings of abandonment and desolation,” writes the Jungian analyst Lisa Marchiano, thus fueling a desire to get things right.[36]

Behavioral expectations are different today compared with “old-school parenting”: emotional regulation has replaced obedience as one of parenting’s central goals. A “tantrum” is not disobedience or a willful, naughty child trying to get their own way, it’s a stress response from a developing brain. People are challenging an inherited culture that denies or dissociates from pain and largely seeks to repress emotions. While once children would fit around the lives of their parents, now parents fit their lives around their children. This is not small work.

Perry’s work suggests that becoming a parent is like an “emotional time warp.” “Whatever age your child is, they are liable to remind you, on a bodily level, of the emotions you went through when you were at a similar stage,” she writes.[41]

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.

It was strange, then, when I fell through the portal of motherhood, to feel that these central drives—to work, to earn, to self-actualize—were now, as soon as the baby left my womb, out of place and even immoral. Why, then, was I sent to school and university? Why was I told “You Can Do Anything”? For a game of dress-up? Why the pretense that I could live my life like a man? Or that being a woman counted for something other than maternal duties once you had a baby? Something snapped shut. I was trapped and bound, suddenly, by new bars of restrictive and prescriptive gender norms. This newfound “traditional” code of intensive motherhood clashed with the capitalistic culture I had been instructed in: to be, first and foremost, a worker, an earner and a consumer.

Casting care work as easy work that anyone can do alone is a way of justifying the undervaluation, and underpayment, of carers.

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.

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy suggests that our capacities for empathy, cooperation and altruism—our so-called human capacities—have come about because of the extended period of caregiving human children require. “Mothers would have been among the earliest intellectuals,” she writes.

This made room for more questions. Beyond affording basic living expenses, what was work for? What was its value? What was a good life? What if we didn’t have to work so hard? How much do we need? No, how much do we actually need? What am I entitled to? What is my time worth? Who am I serving? Who is benefiting?

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.