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. It’s a transition period, like adolescence, that involves radical physical and mental changes and has lasting effects. Feminism owes a great debt to the women who smell smoke, and societal assumptions about unmedicated birth, breastfeeding, and intensive mothering continue to harm women’s mental and physical health daily.

Moving from the early stages of her pregnancy to her eldest child’s first day at school, she describes how the mother’s brain literally changes shape’. Matrescence holds the power to carry us back to ourselves, to the rituals and community from which we came; the caregivers we all hold the seed within us to become- and Lucy Jones is the person who should have written it.We don’t properly recognise “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 book is the kind of book we must ensure every one of us reads; every single person sharing this earth side by side with our kin of every form. This is a particularly valuable read if you've had a traumatic birth experience, if you're feeling alone, or if you believe you're failing yourself and/or your child.

Excellent multidisciplinary discussion of modern motherhood, weaving together threads of insight from fields as disparate as ecology, economics, human biology, plant and animal biology, politics, psychology, and modern legal and social realities for new mothers. The Times and Telegraph named it a book of the year (2020) and the paperback became a Times' bestseller (2021). By the time I'd read the first chapter, I'd resolved to take my son into the woods every afternoon over winter. She raises very valid questions on how our society, the corporate world, our 'social media' - makes motherhood a harder task than it already is.

We meet eels that endure five life stages and multiple habitats before breeding once and then dying, and black lace-weaver mother spiders who feed their living bodies to their infants. I feel like I’ve finally been seen in this indescribable journey of what I now understand to be ‘Matrescence’. Absolutely agree we need to value mothers more as a society and I found lots of the scientific information extremely interesting. There is no other time in a human's life course that entails such dramatic change-other than adolescence.