There was always going to be only one theme with which I could start my reading year in 2025: motherhood. Or, even more fittingly, matrescence – the process of becoming a mother. After all, that’s what I’m working on, baking my twins in these final weeks of pregnancy. Lucy Jones’ book has come highly recommended for this period, so naturally I went into it with great curiosity, yet somewhat apprehensively. After all, great expectations are there to be disappointed. Spoiler: I was not disappointed, even though I did go into it looking for something slightly different from what the book ended up offering. But I’ll get to that.
Lucy Jones has built a career writing about culture, science and nature and in this book she combines all three while recounting her own experience of going through pregnancy and early parenthood for the first time.
Matrescence is divided into five parts, diving into pregnancy, birth, postpartum, and contemporary parenting ideals and styles and an outlook at the social change we need, respectively. Each include chapters on the different challenges one has to master or overcome in each phase, from pregnancy complications via traumatic births through to sleep deprivation, breastfeeding and working while parenting. Along the way she dives into scientific studies and discoveries, explaining how, on a physical, neurological and psychological level, matrescence is as big of a deal as puberty. It is a process of drastic change where your brain is rewired, your body is pumped full of hormones and changes faster than your mind can fathom, and you move from one social position to another, from one identity to the next. And yet, Lucy Jones argues, this change (in our Western cultures at least) is not adequately recognised socially. Its significance is undermined, and the people who go through this phase are expected to go on as normal without any guidance to speak of (except, of course, for those long lists of what you should and shouldn’t be doing: Exercise, but don’t overdo it! Eat more of this, avoid that! Gain weight, but not too much! …)
“No one was talking about how it felt to have grown another person, to be two people at the same time.”
Instead of offering guidance, we create mythologies of how an ideal mother should be, and that begins before the baby is born and parented. Throughout pregnancy and birth, Jones finds, ideology determines what is expected of a mother, and the medical world is not free from its influence, far from it. Not only do we fail to question where our ideas of what is good and right come from (unmedicated birth or cesarean? Breast milk or formula?), but we proclaim our judgment, expect the mother to act accordingly but leave her alone to do so. In Jones’ experience, the mother’s needs always come second after the baby’s, even in the eyes of the medical profession. Though of course, if her needs are not met, how can she possibly provide the best care for a newborn? How can we expect her to address each of her child’s emotions with patience and understanding, if she was never taught to regulate her own emotions properly?
In our Western societies, she seems to conclude, the birth of a baby is celebrated, the birth of a mother is brushed aside. Jones addresses the ways in which capitalism has naturalised care work by calling it love to hide its value while fundamentally, systemically depending on it. Not a new argument, for anyone slightly engaged in recent feminist and socialist discourse, but an essential part of the bigger picture, nonetheless.
What I missed in this book – to add another expectation to a woman trying to balance family and professional lives – was more of the emotional aspects of matrescence. I gathered from her vulnerable and honest accounts of her own experience, that she struggled to adapt to her new role and lacked the support systems she desperately needed. I am glad to report that, personally, I haven’t yet encountered many of the same issues, though I can see traces of them in interactions and have had to check my own feelings and assumptions and their origins occasionally. From what I heard about this book before reading it, I was eager to dive deeper into what matrescence meant for the author herself on a deeper emotional and psychological level. I wanted to be there experiencing this change alongside her, to get more of an idea of what it could be like for me. Jones, however, doesn’t write to please me as a reader and she does what she sets out to do really well: to offer an introduction into this newer field of scientific research and situating it in a social context. Perhaps, if I return to this book in a year or so I will have a whole new realm of shared experiences to relate to her. And I am sure there are many moments ahead when it will do me good to remember passages from Matrescence and to ask myself what ideal of motherhood is guiding my behaviour and my reaction to it.
“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.”
Published by Allen Lane, 2023
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