Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

by Lucy Jones

Somehow all of the baggage that I had accumulated as a person about what was valuable just fell away. I could not only be me—whatever that was—but somebody actually needed me to be that…If you listen to [your children], somehow you are able to free yourself from baggage and vanity and all sorts of things, and deliver a better self, one that you like. The person that was in me that I liked best was the one my children seemed to want. Toni Morrison

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.

I felt his sounds in my body. Each vocalization was another sheet of colored cellophane paper over my tasks.

I tried to explain to my husband why I couldn’t concentrate but it was difficult to articulate. A part of me feels like it should be with the children, so I can’t fully give myself to work. I am entangled. When I work, there is most often a low-level hum of discomfort, unless they are asleep, unconscious.

A major study found that eleven indicators of stress were 40 percent higher for women working full-time while bringing up two children than among women working full-time with no children.[1]

Women usually work a “second shift” at home on top of their paid work, taking on much of the care of children and housework.[2] Then there’s the “third shift,” which builds on Arlie Hochschild’s metaphor, and has been used to refer to the work of maintaining harmony in the marriage, learning about child development and assuming the psychological burden of the family’s emotional well-being.

By naturalizing the work of caregiving and raising children, society can obscure and mystify what it actually is: the infrastructure propping up capitalism. Without workers, there is no work.

As she writes, “The true cost of inequality is obscured by national income accounts that treat care for others and investments in human capabilities as just another form of consumption, rather than a fundamentally important investment in human and social capital.”

In fact, the work of motherhood was much harder than the paid work I had done previously (which, admittedly, wasn’t saving lives). There were no breaks and I often worked for sixteen or more hours a day.

Care work is hardcore. It is life-and-death work. It is fevers and risk and birth and illness and screaming and love and transference. It is transformation and hope. It is quick thinking and deep patience. It is resentment and anger. It is sacrifice and gift.

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.

I learned what it’s like to feel two conflicting things at the same time: to want to see my friends and have time away, but also never to want to leave for very long. I was both vulnerable and newly strengthened. My reflexes had never been quicker.

the University of Massachusetts found, in a synthesis of literature on working mothers, that matrescence was associated with enhanced knowledge, skills and capacity. They found evidence that it “strengthened women’s mindset, willpower, and overall emotional intelligence.”[7]

Babies and young children look at us with full eye contact, and none of the self-consciousness and shame that comes with adulthood. They “are the R&D department of the human species, the blue-sky guys, while we adults are production and marketing,” as Alison Gopnik, professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, says.[9] No snark, no cynicism, no sarcasm, no sniping. I wanted to be a blue-sky guy. My children were leading me back to the world of childhood.

I know I am fortunate to be able to work from home while the children are young, though I worry about how freelance precariousness will affect our long-term economic security.

The way we approach reproductive labor—the way we treat mothering bodies and minds—is similar to the way we destroy the living world, habitats, human life, and health and well-being, in the fetish for growth at any cost. We do it all in the service of an extractivist capitalism which uses and exploits “public goods”—human and nonhuman life, in other words—in order to confer advantages and power to those at the top.

Maybe this could be the beginning of a do-over, an edit, a new version. Maybe I can meet myself as a child or teenager and be kinder, less critical, less afraid of painful emotions.

Maybe, through caring for my children, through the deep satisfaction of making, with their father, a harbor of love, I can find a healthier and more compassionate relationship to myself, and change how I imagine the world.

“We all reach adulthood having sustained some injury to our developing sense of self,” writes Marchiano. “These wounds will surface in new ways when we become parents, creating unique challenges for us but also offering us new opportunities to heal them.”[4]

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.

Until matrescence, I held fast to the idea that I was self-reliant, felt uncomfortable being dependent on others. I didn’t want to be a burden or an imposition. But that illusion has been shattered and I am coming to terms with it.

I have found an absence of self-compassion, and that absence can make change harder. It made sense when I read a study by psychologists in Portugal that found that, for women at risk of postnatal depression, practicing self-compassion could increase emotional health and improve overall health outcomes.[6]

There is power in parenting that teaches children to challenge the harms of the status quo.

In the anthology Revolutionary Mothering, a group of mothers and academics posed the question: “How do we get from a conservative definition of mothering as a biological destiny to mothering as a liberating practice that can thwart runaway capitalism?”[8]

We have to see the structures we’ve inherited in order to tear them down. So many women believe their struggles with matrescence are the result of their own weakness and moral failing. This is a lie and it inhibits honest talk and social change.

What kind of world could we imagine and create if, instead of pretending we were thrown into existence, as though by magic, we truly considered our vulnerable, intimate, tactile, entangled, animal origins?

My children are the main actors, and I am the audience. I will always be in thrall to them, but they won’t always be in thrall to me. And I won’t always be able to watch over them, to keep them safe in my protection.