Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

by Lucy Jones

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.

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.

Blindsided and increasingly isolated, I fell down a rabbit hole. I had gone, but I didn’t know where, or if I would return. I found I was confronted with my selves anew: my childhood self, the bare, naked roots of early psychic disturbances. This, I did not expect. 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.

Matrescence. “The process of becoming a mother, which anthropologists call ‘matrescence,’ has been largely unexplored in the medical community,”

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.

The likelihood of depressive episodes doubles during this period, compared with other times in a woman’s life.[11]

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

Pregnancy can be a vulnerable and dangerous time—and trigger the most life-threatening conditions, such as sepsis, mental illness, autoimmune disease—and the consequences of forced pregnancy will be myriad and devastating.

Overcome by the strangeness of it all, I began to fall silent. Barely any of my peer group had children. I had friends around for a birthday cake and a cup of tea and I barely said a word. At my baby shower, I felt behind a pane of glass. I couldn’t convey what was happening to me. “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]

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]

The truth is simply that birth really hurts for most women. Studies and figures vary but suggest that a third to 45 percent of women experience traumatic childbirth. It is believed that 4–6 percent of women will develop PTSD after giving birth.[38]

There is great power in birth, and many women do find it empowering. But there is a point at which the absence of information becomes manipulative.

As my cervix effaced, so too did my previous self, the person I was before. As she was readying to be born, part of me was dying. As she was born, I was divided. I didn’t realize this until later.

In the days and weeks afterwards, I thought about the birth constantly. I felt the need to talk about it, but to whom?

Instead of being given proper information about postnatal care, we were advertised to.

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

But we need more solutions than a box to sequester mothers away in, alone.

In the drive to normalize breastfeeding the pendulum has swung too far, straying into misinformation and deceit. In the zeal to reform, the reformers have become fanatical.

(Somewhere subconscious, there was an anxious flicker: might there be danger within me, too?)

I felt happy to see her, but suddenly shy and withdrawn. I found it harder to make conversation now, as I was adapting to spending most of the time alone (well, not technically: the strangeness of caring for a young baby is feeling alone, while never actually being alone). My friend started to speak and something strange happened. I found I couldn’t fully concentrate on what she was saying. Every sound or movement the baby made drew my eye to her involuntarily.

Something similar would happen at night. When she cried out, I registered the sound in my cells, my body, before my consciousness, and it would jolt me awake.

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.

When I tried to take some time away from her, I found I was never comfortable or relaxed. I was always pleased to see my friends, but the experience itself didn’t feel wholly pleasant.

I had a hunch that my brain was being altered in pregnancy, but the oft-repeated cliché of “baby brain” did not resonate. Before matrescence, all I knew about the maternal brain was that “momnesia” or “mum brain” might mean a blanket forgetfulness or scattiness.

A study published in 2022 suggests that the reductive myth that women are essentially brain-damaged by motherhood affects how women see themselves.[3] A group of mothers self-reported their memory as worse than non-mothers despite no actual difference in cognitive performance. The researchers found evidence of subjective but not objective cognitive deficit.

the impact of pregnancy on the brain is as significant as the impact of adolescence.

The ideal of the mother who could solve all problems by always being there was, perhaps, a myth: even when I was there and able to give my all, sometimes it just wasn’t enough. Sometimes I couldn’t be the medicine I had been led to believe only I, her mother, could be. This crushed my naive understanding of a “maternal instinct.”

This was the most intense period of learning and knowledge-acquiring of my life, and the baby was my teacher.

I sometimes felt shipwrecked by the tumultuous changes I was undergoing.

But I couldn’t express what was on my mind. Was it normal to feel turned inside out? Was this new hybrid self what my life would be now? Is everyone frightened every day that their baby will die? How can I soothe my inner baby while soothing my actual baby? Would my nervous system feel on edge forever? What is the word for the realization that your society has left you ill-equipped for a major part of the journey of your life? When a mother cries, is it also developmental?

The isolated parenting that women do in this society is not the best way to raise children or treat women who mother. bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

What do playgrounds say to women? They say—“You know what, just fuck you! You haven’t anywhere to change dirty diapers—fuck you, deal with it. You and your babies don’t count enough for us to put in the plumbing. Are you going to sit for hours under the boiling sun? Okay! Because you don’t count. This work doesn’t count.” Naomi Wolf, Interview with the Guardian (2001)

on closer inspection, it became clear that a further set of assumptions about motherhood had lain dormant inside me. When the baby was born, they reared up, reinforced by what I read and heard. Good mothers are content and grateful, undemanding and unambitious. Good mothers are fulfilled by their children. Mothers shouldn’t pursue their own interests: they are morally obligated to put themselves to one side, especially in the early years.

Looking over the old baby record book, a seed was planted: standards of infant care were culturally relative. Perhaps, then, our ideal of motherhood was constructed, too. 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.

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.

It started to weigh down on me, this constant mandate to enjoy it all. I wondered why it was such a common trope. Had they not made the most of it? Were they trying to make sure I didn’t make the same mistake? Why was it so important to people that I saw these as the best days of my life? It left me with a note of fear: when my children left home, would I be the one wandering around the shopping mall, staring nostalgically at babies, wishing for the past?

For all the new characters who had appeared and seemed to be invested in my day-to-day—the health visitors and parenting gurus and kind old ladies at the mall—this was the loneliest time of my adult life.

Once matrescence hit, most of my social support came virtually, through Instagram accounts, parenting podcasts and in messages from friends on my phone.

I stopped listening to music. I didn’t know what to play. I didn’t know who I was.

As time passed, this new isolation and alienation chipped away at my sense of self. It felt as if I was dropping out of society entirely.

Saying yes to invitations wasn’t simple. I was anxious about losing the little sleep I was getting. The baby was highly sensitive to different environments and sensory stimulation. I didn’t know what to talk about. I didn’t know what to say about looking after a baby all day. Matrescence was another country, another planet. I didn’t know how to talk about the existential crisis I was facing, or the confronting, encompassing relationship I was now in. I didn’t know what was happening to me. I was ashamed that I felt so overwhelmed. Often, I simply didn’t have the energy to talk.

It felt as if I’d lost any crumbs of social ease I had earned.

The less I talked, the more the silence grew. So, for a while, I withdrew.

Shame is dangerous because it makes people feel that they are on the outside of the group, causing them to hide away and isolate from others, as Professor Brené Brown has explained. She coined the term “mother-shame” to describe the particular intensity of societal expectations women face around parenthood.[16]

So I’m meant to be self-controlled and serene when there are dangers and hazards around every corner? There was no outlet for my anger, nor could I properly articulate it, so I stuffed it down. And, like anger often does, it festered away over time, and my mood started to drop.

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.

There is limited evidence about the long-term effects of sleep deprivation, because, says Walker, “we feel it morally unacceptable to impose that state on humans—and increasingly, on any species.”[7] Except new mothers.

Although most of my friends had happy children in nurseries, I couldn’t quiet the influential external voices which said she was too young not to be looked after at home.