Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

by Lucy Jones

I couldn’t reconcile the need to care with the need to earn. I didn’t know who I was anymore. I felt increasingly insecure, psychically disintegrated.

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?

Why is having a mixture of feelings—both good and bad—about matrescence so hard to admit to?

“I wish I had known how much old stuff I’d never really dealt with would come to the fore.”

“I wish I’d understood more about how childhood trauma (smacking, shaming, being shouted at as most 80s kids were I think!) can manifest and trigger you when you have your own children.”

It is true that I wanted to be the one primarily looking after our daughter in her early years, but I also felt a powerful and amorphous external pressure to retire from work, take up my place at home and transform into a different type of being.

I felt strongly that the health and well-being of our baby was my responsibility. I saw my husband—who wanted and supported an egalitarian partnership—as an important player, but, from what I’d learned, from early training in psychotherapy, from books, from media and culture, from other people’s comments, my mothering was the fundamental factor in her destiny.

Mothers spend twice as much time looking after their children every day compared with the 1960s, while also working more.

The modern institution of intensive motherhood silences women, contributes to maternal mental illness, and leaves women too worn out to fight. To fight for what? Potentially transformative policy changes, such as proper maternity leave, flexible working hours, better and more affordable childcare.

Many mothers I speak to are highly anxious because they are scared of fucking up their own children. In the survey I conducted, almost half of the mothers said that “triggering childhood issues” was an emotionally challenging part of becoming a mother.

While once children would fit around the lives of their parents, now parents fit their lives around their children. This is not small work.

Infants cannot hide or repress their emotions or emotional needs, which can be a trigger for a caregiver who is emotionally repressed. But, if this is true, how would I learn to calm my inner child while soothing my actual child? I needed to learn how to regulate myself.

So much of the gentle parenting school—Perry, Lansbury, Dr. Becky—is great. Who wouldn’t want to give their child the best opportunities in life? Who wouldn’t want to learn how to help their child develop emotional resilience? The problem isn’t the desire to look after children as gently and consciously and respectfully as possible, it’s the fact that this work still mostly plays out along unequal gender lines. The pressure is, as ever, on the individual mother rather than shared among wider social structures. And, sometimes, that mother is sleep-deprived and overburdened. This ideology is too much for one mother to take on.

Even into the second year of motherhood, my sense of self was ruptured.

I was responsible for the literal survival of an actual human person. The dissonance between what I felt in myself—that this was a big deal—and what I felt society and culture were telling me—that this was not valuable work (although you have to get it totally right)—was bewildering.

When there is so much conflicting baby-care advice, mothers are left with no obvious path, no clear footing. We have to take a step into the unknown, into that empty space. Will it damage the baby psychologically if she cries for a while on a car journey? Will our attachment be damaged if I can’t breastfeed exclusively? Will her sense of security and stability be affected if she goes to childcare? “Terrible, unendurable,” Kierkegaard called this lack of knowing—and sometimes I felt this about the heaviness of potential harm.

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.

“So at the time women are most likely to suffer from mental illness we isolate them inside, expect them to match unrealistic human ideals, judge their every move, demand they get their body back after the violence of birth, silence their lived experience, and expect them to survive on inadequate sleep?”

When their father was here, in the evenings after work and at the weekends, or we were with close family members, the experience of mothering was very different. It felt safer, less frightening, less fraught. I was able to panic less. Get a drink. Go to the loo.

What do we lose as a culture when we make the tacit assumption that mothers will stop dreaming?

Motherhood is an occupation in all senses of the word. Those who have occupied me are now living both outside and inside me. By which I mean, sometimes there is no membrane between us, despite appearances. They have annexed my consciousness.

Mummy, I need you! Please don’t work. Please don’t work, Mummy. Mummy, Mummy, Mummy, open the door! Mummy! Pleeeease. I’m taffy, streeeeeeetched until it breaks.

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”?

In matrescence, I felt a strange but strong pressure to pretend that I a) wasn’t really working much, b) didn’t want to work, and c) only worked because our household financial needs required it, not because I found fulfillment outside of motherhood, as I had for my previous decades of existence.

The more I shrank my self, I sensed, the better mother I would be.

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.

Indeed, working outside the home is essential for many women’s well-being.

Early motherhood—when infants are pure animal, pure bodily desire, pure instinct and want—can be particularly challenging for parents who weren’t allowed to be wild in their own childhood, who had to split off parts of their personality.