Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood

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This book tells the story of a mother who had traumatic birth experiences and faced childcare challenges with minimal support. We pay respect by giving voice to social justice, acknowledging our shared history and valuing the cultures of First Nations. I wouldn’t have wanted to read this brutally honest book whilst pregnant (or attempting to be…); but 23 years later can say that so much resonated. Instead, we are expected to get on with it, sublimate all our needs to our new baby, and weather this most fundamental of human shifts without making too much of a fuss.

How can this be, Lucy Jones asks, when it is “a transition that involves a whole spectrum of emotional and existential ruptures”? The only thing that didn’t make sense to me was the undertone of “I had no idea that motherhood was difficult! Speaking about motherhood as anything other than a pastel-hued dream remains, for the most part, taboo.

Describing how it has enabled her to re-experience the past, she conjures “the scrape of armbands removed from an arm, the lemon-pine smell of hedgerow leaves and shrubs at adult-knee height, the dried-out film of a dead snail … the warm smell of swimming pools, the scent of my mother’s navy mohair cardigan”. It’s a transition period, like adolescence, that involves radical physical and mental changes and has lasting effects.

I just wish it had been published a few years ago- it would have been much better for me to have read it before I had my own children! Jones sheds a fascinating light on the plethora of issues surrounding how childbirth and mothering fits (or fails to fit) into the current social and economic systems of the modern, western world.

In reflecting on her own experiences, and speaking with experts, she has become passionate about fostering open discussion about the pain and risk of childbirth, and how to mitigate them. Initially I felt they jarred with the body of the work, which follows Jones’s journey into motherhood and is divided according to a series of themes, including birth, the brain, sleep and society. And not just because I am in matrescence but because I have a mother, I know many mothers, and I could have been a much better friend and supporter if I would have been taught this stuff 10 years ago.