Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood

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Because your upbringing is bound to influence your maternal identity, she advises taking the time to really think about the way you were mothered. Ask yourself "what are the things that I want to replicate with my own child?" or "what are the things that I want to do differently?" she says. It's OK to chart your own course, she adds. It's about owning your parenting journey. Beautifully written, movingly told and meticulously researched, Losing Eden is an elegy to the healing power of nature, something we need more than ever in our anxiety-ridden world of ecological loss. Woven together with her own personal story of recovery, Lucy Jones lays out the overwhelming scientific evidence for nature as nurturer for body and soul with the clarity and candour that will move hearts and minds - a convincing plea for a wilder, richer world - Isabella Tree, author of Wilding Identity crisis feeling and confusing emotions- your instinct is becoming a mother is big deal (you are solely responsible, everything changes etc) but society doesn’t value motherhood role yet also advocates you ‘must do it right’ (so much guilt tripping, ‘doing it all’ concept etc) You'll marvel, wince and want to take to the streets after reading Lucy Jones sweeping and courageous multidisciplinary survey of the motherlands. I wish we'd read it before we had our kid. (Mother) nature read in truth and awe - Tom Mustill A radical new examination of the transition into motherhood and how it affects the mind, brain and body

Foxes Unearthed: A Story of Love and Loathing in Modern Britain was published by Elliott & Thompson in 2016. A beautiful contemplation of the extraordinary yet ordinary metamorphosis that adult humans undergo as they become mothers. I was entranced. Jones's lyrical, compassionate exploration of the ever-shifting boundaries of selfhood that evolved within our interconnected biosphere, confronts today's societal demands for individual autonomy, culminating in a passionate and powerful maternal roar for change. Wonderful - Gaia Vince Need deeper social change to help rather than anti depressants for postnatal depression )treating symptom not cause) 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.Anyone who has ever spent any time on a labour ward will know why: birth can be long, bloody and traumatic. And that is just the first step along the road to the creation of a different being, a mother. It is life-changing, it is wonderful, but for many it is also fraught with worry and feelings of inadequacy. This book is a powerful mix of information, data, advice and story-telling. I had my own children many years ago now, but I recognised much of the confusion and alienation that affects new mothers. Whatsmore, many of the trends in natural childbirth, pain relief, breast feeding and intensive parenting seemed more ideological, and less open to a woman’s choice than when I went through it myself.

To read this book – and I very much hope its audience is not confined to women who are about to or have recently given birth – is to emerge chastened and ready for change. Anger is not an emotion we expect from mothers. But, as Jones says, good anger is necessary. Let us hold to that.” —Marianne Levy, I News (UK)

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Jones is known primarily as a science and nature writer (her first book was about foxes and her most recent, Losing Eden, looked at the human need for wild spaces) and I’ll confess I sighed slightly when I waded through an opening section about slime mould, though no doubt this will reassure readers of her other work that Matrescence is not a complete departure. Subsequent chapters begin with similar passages, which, Jones writes, attempt to show that natural change is not always beautiful. 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. If at times there is an uneasy tension in this book between the science, memoir, social commentary and flashes of creative writing, this is a testament to its ambition. Jones never becomes bogged down in the material, which is quite an achievement considering its scope. At times I even wanted more. Jones hints at her “conservative (childhood) home”, and I found myself wondering how our own mothers shape our experience of matrescence. But to go there is to ask a lot of a writer, and I don’t blame her for not doing so. Jones is a pioneer, and as such has left some ground unexplored. This book is a beginning, and a fine one at that. Part memoir, part scientific and health reporting, part social critique, ecological philosophy, eco-feminism and nature writing, Matrescence is a kind of whodunnit, ferreting out with the most nuanced, searing and honest observations, why mothers throughout this heightened transition are at a breaking point, and what the institution of intensive, isolated motherhood can tell us about our still-dominant social and cultural myths.

A passionate and thorough exploration of the growing scientific evidence showing why humans require other species to stay well - Guardian It talks about the rawness of emotions that being a mother brings, the infinite joy and the helplessness, the initial isolation and the power of healing a community brings, the reshaping of a mother's brain (literally) and the way of looking at life expands and contracts at the same time. If you only read one book about what it means to become a mother, let it be this one. Sure, there are a million books out there about how to take care of a child (and most of them are contradicting each other, or shift gears every couple of years), but very few about what it means to become a mother, to go through matrescence. There is no other time in a human's life course that entails such dramatic change-other than adolescence. And yet this life-altering transition has been sorely neglected by science, medicine and philosophy. Its seismic effects go largely unrepresented across literature and the arts. Speaking about motherhood as anything other than a pastel-hued dream remains, for the most part, taboo.

Why it matters for moms

The fox has for centuries been held as the incarnation of such unlovely traits as deviousness, cunning and cruelty. ... However, the characteristic that emerges most strongly from the nature writer Lucy Jones's book about Vulpes vulpes is its ambiguity. ... [An] intriguing compendium of fox lore - Michael Prodger, The Times Loneliness in mothers - more damaging to health than 15 cigarettes a day and only just researching it in post natal

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.” In this important and ground-breaking, deeply personal investigation, Jones writes of the emerging concept of “matrescence”–the wholeness of becoming a mother. Recognizing changing family dynamics: The birth creates a new family. New possibilities for intimate connections as well as new stresses may have to be dealt with in relationships with the partner, family, and friends. That is not this book, though, and even for mothers who found matrescence a smoother experience, there is much to be gleaned as Jones skilfully elucidates the monumental shifts it brings, from the foetal cells that remain in a mother’s body for decades to evidence that pregnancy and birth has a dramatic, long-term impact on the brain that may even be permanent. Indeed, the chapter on the maternal brain is especially fascinating and, more importantly, validating for those of us who feel society’s minimising of matrescence flies in the face of our experience of it. This feeling is neatly summarised by Jones when she writes: “The closest I had ever been to death, to birth, to growth, to the co-conscious, to rapture, to rupture – was, according to the world around me, boring.” To read these words feels affirming, even radicalising. I find myself inwardly cheering at one point when another mother describes how “insipid/idealistic portrayals of motherhood made me less interested in it as a young person. I thought it was boring when it’s one of the most extreme socio-political experiences I have ever been through.” Which is indicative of the need for journalist and prize-winning nature writer Lucy Jones‘ book, an ambitious, wide-ranging work that is at once memoir, analysis and social study. Matrescence, Jones tells us, is as significant as adolescence. Yet the permitted language of motherhood – phrases like, “feeling a bit tired” and, “the baby blues” – does nothing but diminish the experience. Having internalised society’s message that motherhood must be kept separate from the colleagues and employers, that it is “mindless and unintellectual”, Jones found herself subject to an increasing sense of alienation. ”I had always believed in the power of words,” she says. “But here, they failed me.”Bolstering her own experience with scientific research, Jones shows the huge changes going on in the maternal mind, brain and body, and asks why it is so little talked about