Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood

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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 do however wish there had been more focus on the difference support can make to this journey and having the support there.

I'm going to be interviewing Lucy in November, and I'm looking forward to finding out how she wrote such an incredible book. 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. I appreciated the laser focus on her own physical and emotional development, but the statistical and theoretical context gives a sense of the universal. 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. What I found instead was a boundary-pushing book that is altogether tricksier, more complex and creative, transcending even the “part-memoir, part-critical analysis” genre that has become such a commonplace format for female authors in recent years.

There were some I wasn’t comfortable hearing, but the criticisms were nonetheless worthy of consideration.

Like many women, Jones describes feeling “hoodwinked” by norms of motherhood, how amid the pain, trauma and guilt of being unable to breastfeed she began to detect a coercive force.Yet the focus remains on individual responsibility, maintaining the illusion that we are impermeable, impenetrable machines, disconnected from the world around us. I’m so glad that it exists during a time when I’m in my own early matrescence, because so much of what’s in it has been a comfort and reassurance to me. 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, retaining extra grey matter for years, processing more information, emotion and memory.