Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

by Lucy Jones

A daddy longlegs walks past, ghostly gentleman sprite.

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

It was a setup, in which mothers were destined to fail.

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.

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.

Only, it is. 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] This figure rises for women of color, those in disadvantaged socioeconomic groups who face systemic health inequalities, and women who have experienced loss (miscarriage, stillbirth, neonatal death or a child taken into care).[12],[13],[14] Suicide is the leading cause of death in women in the perinatal period between six weeks and one year after giving birth in the UK.[15]

But these figures are likely too low: the National Childbirth Trust (NCT), the most influential parenting institution in the UK, estimates that in fact half of new mothers experience mental health problems but only half of those will seek help.[16]

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?

Unlike other cultures, which treat becoming a mother as a major, traumatic life crisis, with special social rites and rituals, Western societies had been failing to recognize matrescence as a major transition: a transition that involves a whole spectrum of emotional and existential ruptures, a transition that can make women ill, a transition in which the mother, as well as the baby, could be celebrated. We had been failing to care for mothers, or for one another, very well at all.

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.

They did, leading the team to conclude that memory, via intact synaptic connections, survived metamorphosis.[1]

For a while, the essential parts of the caterpillar are hidden within the goo—its neurons, its sensory experiences—but they do remain, and are remodeled to form the next stage of life.

Time started to bend. I was carrying the future inside me. I would learn that I was also carrying the eggs, already within my baby’s womb, that could go on to partly form my potential grandchildren. My future grandchildren were in some way inside me, just as part of me spent time in the womb of my grandmother.

It was disconcerting sharing my body with another, a being with her own drive, her own future, her own vulnerable corporeality. I was confronted, for the first time, with my fundamental lack of control.

“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]

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. The exchange creates what the leading geneticist Dr. Diana Bianchi calls a “permanent connection which contributes to the survival of both individuals.”

From the moment I was pregnant, I didn’t just feel different. I was different. I am different. On a cellular level. I would never be singular again.

(death lurks behind a veil in childbirth),

Looking back now, I wonder if the hypervigilant, anxious state of mind that followed the birth may have been a symptom of birth trauma or PTSD. I hesitate to use the word “trauma,” because we were both fine—I had my beautiful, wonderful daughter in my arms. But for a few awful, life-changing moments, I thought that she might die. That I might die.

What we have come to accept as “normal” birth is, in fact, deeply disturbing for many women.

In my arms, a collection of trillions of atoms that had cycled through generations of ancient supernova explosions. We were both so old, made from stars born billions of years ago. We were both so new, she, breathing, outside me; I being made again in matrescence.

I heard the contraction and expansion of the universe bouncing into existence, new galaxies, axons, dendrites; cells and love, cells and love.

I imagined the ground bursting and cracking below us. I had lost a membrane of protection between myself and the world; my nerve endings felt exposed and fraying.

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

“Unless you speak about it, it can’t be normalized and demystified and it becomes this big, terrible secret,”

growing research suggests non-kin adoption in a variety of species may be common.

Humans, who evolved in collective care structures, are not the only species capable of altruism and non-kin family-making.

Care (noun): “burden of the mind” from the Old English word cearu (sorrow, anxiety, grief) from the Old German word karō (lament, trouble, care)

My role as protector was different outside the house: there were more threats and dangers. The road seemed louder and busier than it did before she was born. My arms were taut around her, my claws ready to gouge an eye.

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

This hyperaroused, vigilant state would last for many months—and in a less tense form for years (all time?). Later I would learn that hypervigilance can be a symptom of PTSD following childbirth, which, it is thought, 9 percent of women in the US—over 300,000 women a year—suffer from.

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 felt frustrated. Why couldn’t I simply talk to a friend? Why couldn’t I override this occupation for an hour? I hadn’t yet realized the relational reality of our dyad; that, really, I was no longer the individual I thought I once was.

I began to realize that motherhood is a watching. I was, first and foremost, a sentinel. Her sentinel.

In the early months of her life outside the womb, it started to become clear that she had never completely left my body. I felt her as I had when she was physically inside me, but in a different, more carnal way. It made more sense when I discovered that my brain had changed beyond recognition.

Outside the context of being exposed to their infants, they found evidence that motherhood tunes the brain to be “more flexible, responsive and efficient.”[5]

The “cognitive load” of adapting and adjusting to the needs of a growing child and adult over time may constitute an “enriching environment” which makes the brain more resilient. Orchard points out that this would be expected for caregiving parents of all genders.

It was a relief, to me, to look at these images: to see, in black, white, yellow and orange, that the hunch that I had become, was becoming, a different creature wasn’t in my imagination. The data anchored me. This was the metamorphosis of matrescence.

Shrunken gray matter? Decrease in cortical thickness? It sounds as though the brain might be deteriorating, or losing some of its abilities. 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.”

She told me that, as a mother herself, she likes experiencing the “powerful biological drive.” “I’ve never smelled anything as wonderful as my babies’ heads, for instance. Some of these things seem to be evolutionarily conserved and engraved into our brains.

Hoekzema’s study—of women before conception, through pregnancy and in the postpartum period—found that significant changes in the brain happened in the Default Mode Network (DMN), an area associated with processes like the perception of the self, self-referential processing, self-related mental explorations and autobiographical memory.

Hands-on caring shapes brain circuitry and causes other biological changes. In 2020, a groundbreaking study showed that having a baby changes a father’s brain anatomy.[16]

Humans are one of the only mammals with brains that grow so significantly outside the womb.

Social vocalization and audible communication may have evolved in mammals so that mothers could find a lost infant. “Language is born of absence,” wrote Roland Barthes.[29]

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.”

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

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?