Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

by Lucy Jones

it dawned on me that my mother went through a lot to give birth to me, and then to look after me as an infant, and then to raise me through childhood.

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.

But still, I wanted to get it right, so I did keep reading books and articles and forums manically, this being the way I had always solved problems and learned about the world. My brain started to frazzle from the conflicting advice about sleeping and feeding. I figured there must be a solution to the puzzle; there must be evidence-based answers. I wanted to follow my own instinct but it was proving hard to locate.

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 is striking that we’ve so forgotten our interdependence that we need scientists to prove to us that we need other people to survive.

Almost half of all new mothers, according to the Red Cross and Co-op, feel lonely “often” or “always.” New mothers spend significant time alone—around 38 percent spend more than eight hours alone each day, according to one study—which

The isolated nature of this relationship is new. For millennia women and children were part of an “actively busy social cluster,”

Millennial caregivers, those born between 1981 and 1996, experience increased isolation and loneliness compared with previous generations,

Just before snakes shed their skin, they become angry or defensive. Snakes become anxious because their vision is impaired during the shed. The shed is called ecdysis.

It hadn’t crossed my mind, before giving birth, that by bringing a life into the world, I would also be bringing about a death.

In the first months, when I couldn’t sleep at night, I pictured small coffins, car accidents, choking. My mind became a theater of all the possible scenarios that could go wrong.

5. I have felt scared or panicky for no very good reason Yes, quite a lot Yes, sometimes No, not much No, not at all What did they mean? Did we live on the same planet? A world which isn’t ultimately safe? A world where bodies fail and children die? Where accidents happen? Does my child growing up in a world that could be three degrees warmer by 2100 count as a very good reason? Or the fact that babies die in the night? What about meningitis? Or sudden death? Or car accidents?

On the outside, I was coping. I was able to look after our baby and present a happy face to most people. On the inside, I was in turmoil, and I wasn’t sure how I could continue. How do you live with your heart ajar?

“Being tired won’t kill you,” I read on a forum. But it felt dangerous, the anxiety and isolation and sleep-deprivation feeding each other, sluicing around. I wasn’t sure how I could keep going.

Sleep deprivation is different to feeling tired. It’s like being underwater, in a new state, another element.

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.

As much as I’m grateful to modern medicine—for the antidepressants that have lifted me out of psychic darkness—it can be used as a sticking plaster in the absence of deeper social change, as a way of patching up rather than addressing the underlying issues that can lead to postnatal mental illness (and much other mental illness) in the first place.

Later, with distance, I could take what I’d read, and ask the question for myself: 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?

we are now learning how significant the neurobiological changes are in pregnancy and the postnatal period, and how these changes increase all women’s vulnerability to psychological illnesses.

There is a highly complex dance between the intrinsic, biological processes triggered by pregnancy and extrinsic environmental factors that “translate into internal signals,” as Pawluski and colleagues put it. It is not one or the other, it’s a mixture of both, which interweaves to create each individual matrescence.

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? Are these the actions of a responsible or functional society?

Mammaaaa! Mammmaaa!!!! I could feel her rising distress in my body. forfuckssake. I couldn’t remain in the sea. I was commanded by her cries. My body stomped me back to the beach, ignoring the stinging stones, my feet thumping angrily on the sand, and bent down to pick her up. I found myself soothing, stroking her hair, swallowing myself again, emptying myself like a bucket of seawater onto the sand. She calmed, and the fire ants receded, hushed. My body cooled as her cries ceased. My nervous system settled down as we slotted together again. I was relieved, satisfied, high on the smell, the feel of her skin and jellylike thighs, her big eyes, and I forgot my irritation, resentment and myself.

I am still uncomfortable with airing my irritation, even if it was for a moment, a flash of a thought. I feared that it might suggest my love for her was wanting. But it wasn’t, and it isn’t. So why does the truth feel so uncomfortable? Why is having a mixture of feelings—both good and bad—about matrescence so hard to admit to?

asked respondents how they thought they could have been better prepared or what they wish they’d known. Here are a few of the answers. “I wish I had known how much old stuff I’d never really dealt with would come to the fore.” “I just wish I’d known how destabilizing it can be.” “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.” “I wish I’d known how difficult it actually is being a mother. I wish I had more understanding towards other mothers.”

I wish I’d known that it would make me question so much of the world and of my own childhood and family upbringing.”

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

Looking at these paintings, it struck me that our society is very like the Kleinian baby: it aims for unlimited gratification, seeking an “inexhaustible and bountiful breast.” It cannot tolerate absence; it can’t allow mothers to express their own needs. Here, in image after image, were mothers as idealized objects; nowhere could I see mothers as subjects, as agents of their own lives.

We want mothers to be perfect because we want, or wanted, our own mothers—and the security they offer us—to be perfect and unlimited.

According to psychoanalysts such as Parker, maternal cruelty may be the result of unmanageable ambivalence. When unreconciled feelings of love and hate go unaddressed, they can intensify, and then explode into helplessness and violence.

the conditions of mothering today make it almost impossible to acknowledge normal ambivalence, leading many to feel unbearable guilt and overwhelming persecutory anxiety.

“Whoever runs the baby industry and makes you think you should be happy and complete after the baby comes, that is bullshit. They should stop telling you congratulations and start saying, are you OK? And what do you need?

Unsurprisingly, “intensive mothering,” which is now both studied and practiced across the industrialized world, is associated with poor maternal mental health, stress and parental burnout.

The sociologist Caitlin Collins, in her study Making Motherhood Work, describes how all mothers in her study, from four different countries, shared “one source of stress: the pressure to live up to an idealized definition of motherhood.”[2]

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

Having it all, or as the psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin puts it, being it all, is too much.

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. They really, really did not want to inflict similar patterns of harm and shame on their children as were inflicted on them.

To destroy the institution is not to abolish motherhood. It is to release the creation and sustenance of life into the same realm of decisional struggle, surprise, imagination and conscious intelligence, as any difficult, but freely chosen work. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born

Finally I came to the thought, All right, then, annihilate me; that other self was a fiction anyhow. And then I could breathe. Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write

Tardigrades are hardy, the most resilient of all animals on Earth. They can survive high and low pressures, temperatures and altitudes; they can withstand radiation (a thousand times’ more than other animals), dehydration (they survive a dry state for ten years or more) and extreme impacts. When frozen, they can remain in a dormant state—the “tun” state—for around twenty months, and then come back to life.

Quantum entanglement involves two or more particles becoming connected to each other in such a way that their properties cannot be described individually anymore. Once entangled, changing the properties of one of the particles can change the other, even if they are very far away from each other. Particles, and even living atoms, seem to share information this way.

requires self-sacrifice which, inevitably, limits and shrinks one’s sense of self. She needed my full attention. So I put myself to one side.

In Mysteries of Small Houses, the poet Alice Notley described the obliteration of the self and the identity crisis many new mothers experience: “He is born and I am undone…for two years there’s no me here.”[2]

In her research and her studies of new mothers, she found that in all the four dimensions of existence—physical, social, personal and spiritual—women were facing huge changes. “Some people think of an existential crisis as a literal threat to existence, and in some sense it is,” she explained, when we talked. “Mortality is very much there for women. But I also talk about it using crisis from the Greek crisis (κρίσις), to choose or to decide. Everything has to be chosen again. What is important to them? How are they going to mother? How are they going to incorporate this identity of mother into themselves?”

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.

But in Western societies, the mother is mostly left to her own devices after birth, her own privacy and autonomy. While being told to stay inside for forty days does sound quite intense, our approach means we don’t honor or acknowledge what a woman has done, or have a sufficient cultural way of marking the passage into a new stage of existence. “The individual mother is left to grapple with the fact that she is not only the source of life but also of potential death for her child,” writes Rozsika Parker.[10]

As time passed after my daughter was born, I realized I was searching for, and trying to create my own, matrescent rituals—rituals that went beyond popping an SSRI every morning along with many thousands of other mothers.

the philosopher Brooke Schueneman describes becoming a mother as a time of “substantial imagination and self-exploration” that has been neglected and obscured. She argues that according to the Socratic, Platonist and Hellenistic assertion of philosophy as a way of learning how to die in order to live more fully, mothers are in a “prime position to embrace this ancient, but relevant, exercise.”

felt a growing anger and resentment towards our broken society and the conditions it imposes on caregivers. One evening, at the Mothers Talking group, I surprised myself by bursting out in frustration: “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?” I had always repressed my anger. It felt strange and new to express it. Hold on to that anger, said Stadlen. That is good anger.