Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood

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This book should be a must-read for pretty much everyone. We don't talk about the hidden realities of the biological, social and psychological effects of matrescence nearly enough. Thank you, Lucy Jones, for changing that - Dr Jodi Pawluski And if the thought of doing anything that isn't about the baby makes you feel guilty, don't be. Creating the space to focus on your own needs is a positive thing for your child, Alpern says. Don’t you just love being a mum?” another new mother asked me at that time, although her eyes were as dark-rimmed as mine, and more than six years later I can still feel the searing, silencing shame. I wish someone could have handed me Matrescence, Jones’s latest book. A beautiful contemplation of the extraordinary yet ordinary metamorphosis that adult humans undergo as they become mothers. I was entranced . . . a passionate and powerful maternal roar for change. Wonderful.” —Gaia Vince, award-winning journalist; author of Adventures in the Anthropocene

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The best book I’ve ever read about motherhood. Matrescence is essential reading, bloody and alive, roaring and ready to change conversations.”–Jude Rogers, The Observer (UK) Lucy Jones's book is a much needed cold shower, a removal of the pink colored lenses through which we are taught to look at motherhood. It's the honest friend you wished you had when you wondered what it will mean to bring a child into the world, if you truly wanted to know and did not only hope for the sanitized, rosy picture that media often serves us. It talks about the day to day realities of child bearing and about how the institution of motherhood in most countries expects the mother to be a village by herself and renounce most of personal ambitions or desires on the altar of the child, without offering her any valuable support. It's a holistic change in multiple domains of your life. You're going to feel it perhaps bodily, psychologically. You're going to feel it with your peer groups. You're going to feel it at your job. You're going to feel it in terms of the big philosophical questions. Feeling not good enough: New mothers may set for themselves the goal of being perfect. The unreality of that may lead to exhaustion and feelings of guiltPerhaps reviving the conceptual term matrescence, coined by and borrowed from anthropologist Dana Raphael (1975), would be most apt within the landscape of maternity. Much like adolescence, it is an experience of dis-orientation and re-orientation marked by an acceleration of changes in multiple domains: physical,psychological,social, and spiritual. We are indeed indebted to the early ‘maternal developmentalists’ who aptly characterized motherhood in its multi-dimension and dynamism, both the oppressive and the liberating—the dichotomous phenomena that are often the hallmark of any major life transition. Their perspectives equalized and served to normalize, rather than pathologize, the 'mixed-feelings’of women. - AURÉLIE ATHAN, FEMINISM & PSYCHOLOGY (2015) Matrescence is a concept introduced in the 1970s by anthropologist Dana Raphael in her book Being Female: Reproduction, Power and Change. She described the complex transitions that take place in a woman’s life as she becomes a mother. In a sense, like the term adolescence, matrescence refers to a healthy but demanding change. A mother-to-be experiences dramatic physical, hormonal, and emotional changes as well as changes in her body shape and in her social identity. In another book, The Birth of a Mother: How the Motherhood Experience Changes You Forever, Daniel Stern, a psychiatrist, suggests that giving birth to a new identity can be as demanding as giving birth to a baby. The transition to fatherhood is also an identity shift. However, matrescence—as the quoted authors point out—is a psycho-neuro-hormonal-biological-social event that is a unique life experience of women. It is the shift from being a woman to being someone’s mother. In a humanistic perspective, that is at once a beautiful and extraordinary accomplishment. The anthropologist author Dana Raphael and the psychiatrist authors suggest there is more happening: pregnancy and birth experiences change a person, a bit like an adolescent emerging from that period is a somewhat different person. As psychiatrist Daniel Stern puts it: “a mother is born.”

Matrescence by Lucy Jones - Penguin Books New Zealand Matrescence by Lucy Jones - Penguin Books New Zealand

Aurélie Athan, Ph.D. Teachers College, Columbia University Ph.D. Clinical Psychology Licensed Psychologist I really hope policy makers read this book too, I have immediately given it to my partner as Lucy Jones manages to explain many of my thoughts through matrescence better than myself.Wow. "Matrescence" is essential reading for - well, everyone. Parenting - especially motherhood - and care in general are so underrated and misunderstood socially that those on the outside are not able to see their immense value and all the sacrifices they require, and those within feel like they are failing if they don't revel in all aspects of parenthood or care or struggle at times. Experiencing the reality: Before the birth, mothers often imagine the baby according to their culture, their personal history, and their own childhood. At birth the reality may be different and the gap between fantasy and reality may be a source of negative or confusing emotions. A wild and beautiful book ... a book that will be passed among friends and will no doubt bring solace ... Reading this, I felt a jolt of recognition ... more than six years later I can still feel the searing, silencing shame. I wish someone could have handed me Matrescence Sophie McBain, New Statesman Reflections on maternal lineage: Becoming a mother may provide a re-experience of her own childhood—repeating or trying to improve what was or was not. I bought this after hearing Lucy Jones speak on a podcast and so many of her views and experiences of matrescence reflected my own.