Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

by Lucy Jones

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.

“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]

The Canadian philosopher Quill Kukla (writing as Rebecca Kukla) looked at the results when searching for “pregnancy” in an academic library, and found that 80 percent of the material related to toxins (such as alcohol and caffeine) that women had to avoid in pregnancy.[22] This skew has wider consequences. It leaves “corporations, fathers, insurers, legislators and others” off the hook, they write.

In the US, the risk of pregnancy-related death is three times higher for Black women and American Indian and Alaska Native women than white women. The majority of these deaths are preventable and caused by structural racism and implicit bias. 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).

the focus in mainstream healthcare in the postindustrial Global North remains overwhelmingly on individual responsibility, maintaining the illusion or ideology that we are impermeable, impenetrable machines, disconnected from the social world around us—and, furthermore, separate and immune from those in power who orchestrate the world.

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.

I didn’t learn anything about these emotional or existential aspects of pregnancy in the week-by-week books or the apps, which mostly discussed the size of the baby in comparison to fruit. Kiwi, banana, pineapple. Even though most pregnancies involve a level of stress and emotional disturbance, such as anxiety, depression, worry, insomnia and impaired concentration, the information in pregnancy emails was about baby outfits and how much coffee one could drink. The psychological destabilization that came with being inhabited by another person was left unaddressed.

“She feels herself vast as this world; but this very opulence annihilates her, she feels that she herself is no longer anything,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir of pregnancy, managing to describe the experience with uncanny precision.[3]

I found the work of the psychoanalyst and social psychologist Joan Raphael-Leff in a book called Pregnancy: The Inside Story, which was published in 1993. She explains pregnancy as a state of being between two worlds: “On a deep unconscious level, the pregnant woman hovers between internal and external worlds, at a crossroads of past, present and future; self and other.” Raphael-Leff offered me a language to describe the “emotional disequilibrium” and the reactivation of “dormant conflicts.”[8] She developed the idea of the “emotional placenta,” where internal images and unconscious historical facts are the nutrients or poisons that influence the “mental gestation” of pregnancy.[9] She normalized the internal distractions which disrupt the “ordinary illusion of unified identity and indivisibility.” Looking back on the anxiety I felt, and the need for reassurance and monitoring, Raphael-Leff’s concept of “internal badness”—the mother’s fear about her own moral shortcomings and whether the baby would be able to withstand them—was illuminating.[10]

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

For most of our evolutionary history, humans lived in small groups. Mothers lived in small social communities. Crucially, this meant that they mothered alongside others. Over hundreds of thousands of years, women foraged, together, with their babies close by. Our brains, our nervous systems, evolved in collective child-rearing societies. For millennia, mothers relied on the help of others to rear infants. Research undertaken by the primatologist and anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy suggests that women needed help simply to feed a baby and ensure its survival through childhood. A lone foraging woman would not have been able to supply the ten to thirteen million calories a human child would need to eat before it could find food independently.[33] So wherever they safely could, human mothers handed babies over to alloparents—“other” parents or fathers.[34] They weaned children early, swaddled them and hung them from doors. Mothers in foraging societies across the world still do.

Millennial caregivers, those born between 1981 and 1996, experience increased isolation and loneliness compared with previous generations, with other stresses including financial strain and lower rates of home ownership. Some may also be “sandwich caregivers,” looking after children as well as elderly parents or relatives.[17] Researchers found a pattern whereby new mothers who felt distressed would actively withdraw, and “silence the self” through fear of “being a burden” or judged as inadequate.

It seems that just as women were making inroads and feeling confident, 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. Andrea O’Reilly

The notion of a “natural” maternal instinct in women originated around this time, advocated for and legitimized by prominent thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau. “The true mother,” he wrote, “far from being a woman of the world is as much a recluse in her home as the nun in her cloister.”[8] This idea continued to reduce women to feeling, instinctual beings, confined—newly—to the home, in opposition to rational man, who belonged in the public sphere.

Today, it is becoming harder to have children, with many women trying to conceive later in their lives, once they’ve established their careers. This means some women may have children in quick succession, which adds to the intensity of early-years child-rearing. At the same time, mortgages and rental costs have risen far more than wages, as has the cost of having children, increasing the pressure for caregivers to return to work, or to work more hours or at more than one job. Childcare is massively underfunded, and there is less social support than ever before. Grandparents tend to be older and may live farther away, meaning they are less able to provide day-to-day support. And the intense competition fostered by predatory capitalism has resulted in a culture of increasing busyness, presenteeism and overwork, which corrodes social relations. Urban design, transport networks, housing design and the design of roads and streets deepen the isolation of caregivers, too. Mothers have been stripped of safe public spaces for play and child-rearing, of collective care structures and public services.

We need to ditch the sexist lexicon. Lactation failure. Hostile uterus. Incompetent cervix. We need new words and phrases. Our understanding of matrescence is limited by the lack of language to describe it. “We have become the first civilization which lacks a discourse on the complexity of motherhood,” says Kristeva.[13] We urgently need that language.