Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

by Lucy Jones

I thought the baby would grow inside my body, as in a flowerpot, that I would still be the same person. But that didn’t seem to be the case.

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.

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.

the idea that women are born with a “natural” maternal “instinct” rather than needing to develop knowledge and skills as caregivers.

While society still judges women without children, to be associated with “the maternal” was to be silenced, limited and diminished.

In the West, when a child is born, the announcement would be “a child is born.” The Tikopia would say, instead, “a woman has given birth.” The Tikopia have a sense of the newborn mother.[7]

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.

To what extent was postnatal mental illness intrinsic and biological, and how much of it was an understandable response to the design of modern parenthood?

Sperm cells are immature when they arrive in the vagina. Then women’s oviduct cells secrete chemicals which mature the sperm and allow it to swim. Instead of the sperm poking the egg like a needle, the egg actually enfolds the sperm and the two cells melt into one.

How on earth does a pregnant woman protect her baby from microplastics? Or from the black carbon emitted by vehicles, which, we now know, can penetrate the placenta? How does she protect herself from the nitrogen dioxide emitted by diesel vehicles, which increases the risk of mental illness?[20] How does she avoid high levels of air pollution, which seem to be linked to miscarriages?

I saw no sign of genuine urgency or action from governments to reduce air pollution and protect future generations at the most vulnerable period of their lives. I, though, had to avoid soft cheese and too much tea.

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).

Yet, 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.

The baby was formed of the atoms of the earth, of the past and the future. Every atom in her body existed when the earth formed 4.5 billion years ago. She will live for many years, I hope, when I have returned to the ground. She will live on the earth when I am gone. Time bends.

What was more difficult was the pressure to pretend that pregnancy was a less dramatic and drastic event than I felt it to be.

During pregnancy, cells are exchanged between the mother and fetus via the placenta. When the baby is born, some of those cells remain intact in the mother’s body. For decades.[1] Perhaps forever. The phenomenon is called microchimerism.

When I started reading and talking to other mothers, I found that many women experience these “intrusive thoughts” in the early months of motherhood, meaning images and fears of the baby hurting itself or even of their intentionally hurting the baby. It seemed to be so common that I wondered if there was a protective mechanism in the postnatal brain which helped mothers to predict hazards and keep the baby safe from them.

I did not know that my brain would undergo any lasting, let alone significant, structural changes in matrescence. I thought that the hormonal impact of pregnancy was a one-time, transient event, to enable the baby to grow, and then, once out, that’s it. It is no surprise that I thought this: we knew virtually nothing about the maternal brain until the 2010s.

Instead, the lead author, Hoekzema, explained to me, volume loss can show a “fine-tuning of connections.” Synaptic reorganization and fine-tuning, it is thought, make the brain more efficient and streamlined in what it needs to do to care for a baby. Or as Pawluski puts it, “to make sure we, and our child, survive parenthood.”

Her lab found various indications supporting such a hypothesis, for instance that stronger volume losses predict stronger mother–infant bonding and functional activation in the mother’s brain towards her infant.

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.

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?

In the last decade or so, the first work has been published recognizing that women experiencing loneliness in pregnancy and new motherhood are more likely to suffer from mental illness.[9] Studies suggest that loneliness also exacerbates symptoms of depression in fathers. The findings suggest serious fault lines in our society. It is striking that we’ve so forgotten our interdependence that we need scientists to prove to us that we need other people to survive.

Is the problem the individual woman who is pathologized for having “PND,” in its diminutive and popular shorthand, or is the problem a society which utterly fails to support women in this major life transition? Was I disordered or dysfunctional, or was my social environment?

The “happiness imperative,” as the psychoanalyst Rozsika Parker called it, rules out the “inevitable unhappiness associated with motherhood.”[1] It is central to contemporary attitudes towards child-rearing. Childcare and parenting manuals uphold happiness as an ideal: “Happy parents mean happy babies,” says Miriam Stoppard. “If you make happiness for him, he will make happiness for you,” writes Penelope Leach. Happiness is not just the goal, it is essential.

These women loved their children unconditionally. That didn’t mean they loved motherhood unequivocally.