Matrescence Quotes

“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.”
― Lucy Jones, Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

“When I entered matrescence, I realized it was a major female experience where feminism had failed.”
― Lucy Jones, Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood

“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? When a mother cries, is it also developmental?”
― Lucy Jones, Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood

“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.”
― Lucy Jones, Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

“I thought mothering would just be changing diapers and cuddling a baby. Instead it too me to the edge of that it means to be human. It tested my empathy to the limit, it challenged me intellectually, it required me to answer and ask questions constantly, to consider metaphysics and the origins of mater.”
― Lucy Jones, Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

“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. I was carrying inside me a pool of amniotic fluid, which was once rivers, lakes and rain. I was carrying a third more blood, which was once soil and stars and lichen.2 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.”
― Lucy Jones, Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood

“They needed me to be in the present and give them a stream of immediate experiences, and so I fell in love with the world again.

Have you seen the shape of water as it is being poured?
Have you let a bumblebee's spun-sugar legs walks across your palm?
Have you tried to say two words at the same time?
Have you seen the opalescence of a bubble?
Have you watched a slug slither?

Have you tried to feel the planet moving?”
― Lucy Jones, Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood

“Being told to "enjoy every minute," while undertaking such psychologically and physically demanding work, is a peculiar type of societal gaslighting.”
― Lucy Jones, Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood

“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. And it was the most political experience of my life, rife with conflict, domination, drama, struggle, and power.”
― Lucy Jones, Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood

“The book was published ten years or so before I was born. Almost half a century later, we still barely acknowledge the psychological and physiological significance of becoming a mother: how it affects the brain, the endocrine system, cognition, immunity, the psyche, the microbiome, the sense of self. This is a problem. 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.”
― Lucy Jones, Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

“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.”
― Lucy Jones, Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

“It’s the most important job in the world, with no manual, no instructions, and you have to keep this baby alive.”
― Lucy Jones, Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

“As much as I obsessed over the requirement to breastfeed exclusively, some part of me started to recognize coercion and manipulation. Faintly, I smelled smoke.”
― Lucy Jones, Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

“Bianchi’s landmark paper on microchimerism describes pregnancy as enacting a ‘long-term, low-grade chimeric state in the human female’. 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.”
― Lucy Jones, Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

“It is difficult to know exactly how many women become unwell in the period before and after becoming a mother. In the UK, where I live, it was previously thought that 10–15 per cent of women develop a mental health problem in pregnancy or the first year of new motherhood – including mild and moderate to severe depression, anxiety, PTSD, psychosis – but more recent figures suggest it could be as many as 20 per cent of women. This means over 100,000 women a year in the UK become mentally unwell in matrescence. Globally, the prevalence of postnatal depression is 17 per cent. With two billion mothers in the world, this means over 350 million women experience perinatal mental health problems.”
― Lucy Jones, Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

“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”
― Lucy Jones, Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood

“Despite the challenging symptoms, both physical and emotional, being in the closest possible physical relationship with another being was one of the most enlivening, wild and interesting experiences of my life.”
― Lucy Jones, Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood

“I thought early motherhood would be gentle, beatific, pacific, tranquil: bathed in a soft light. But actually it was hardcore, edgy, gnarly. It wasn’t pale pink; it was brown of shit and red of blood. And it was the most political experience of my life, rife with conflict, domination, drama, struggle and power.”
― Lucy Jones, Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood

“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. And it was the most political experience of my life, rife with conflict, domination, drama, struggle and power.”
― Lucy Jones, Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

“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.”
― Lucy Jones, Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood

“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.”
― Lucy Jones, Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

“There is power in parenting that teaches children to challenge the harms of the status quo.”
― Lucy Jones, Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

“Still, most of the information women are given in mainstream health literature relates the hormonal experience of pregnancy to physical characteristics—the body is preparing to make milk, the ligaments are relaxing to make room for the growing baby—or to the simple narrative that pregnant women might cry more at sad films. Much of my life had been spent eye-rolling at gendered ideas about female hormones, which seemed always to stereotype and tether women. Even so, I had often taken the contraceptive pill throughout my menstrual cycle so as to avoid the business entirely, suppressing my cycle so I wouldn’t have to bleed and could have more control of my body. I repressed these parts of myself that I deemed “feminine,” which would have me put in a box and labeled, in order to get ahead in a man’s world. I had been afraid of being labeled “hormonal” and not taken seriously. But in pregnancy, in matrescence, I had no choice. The neurobiological changes were so dramatic and uncontrollable that I simply had to find a way of integrating my new, female animal body into my sense of myself.”
― Lucy Jones, Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

“Casting care work as easy work that anyone can do alone is a way of justifying the undervaluation, and underpayment, of carers. 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.”
― Lucy Jones, Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

“Sleep deprivation even impacts DNA and learning-related genes in the brain involved in memory-making. Was that why other mothers didn’t talk about the reality of early motherhood or childbirth? Because they hadn’t made the memories?”
― Lucy Jones, Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

“Perhaps the cultural obsession with ‘natural’ birth reflects the extent of our detachment from our bodies and from the Earth. We are so disconnected from the rest of the natural world that we don’t know what ‘nature’ is: bodies failing, cuckoos pushing eggs out of nests, a weirdly small human pelvis and a big infant head, illness and disease, shit and blood, ticks and cockroaches. ‘Natural childbirth’ in the ‘natural world’ often ends in infant or maternal death. ‘Natural’ childbirth can end in clitoral tears, sepsis, rectoceles, fistulas and psychosis.”
― Lucy Jones, Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

“Pregnancy and early motherhood is a vulnerable time for a woman’s health and wellbeing. Across the globe, a woman dies every two minutes due to pregnancy and childbirth, with the majority of deaths happening in low-income countries.”
― Lucy Jones, Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood