Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood

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I bought this after hearing Lucy Jones speak on a podcast and so many of her views and experiences of matrescence reflected my own. 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. BUt moving beyond this close personal group, you are bombarded with sights and sounds and advices on mothers whose bodies bounced back, mothers who are climbing the corporate ladder AND mothering, mothers who are excelling at work and also helping their school going kids excel. I absolutely related to lots of the book, and really tried to take the first few chapters from an objective point of view because I did not have the same experiences when it came to child birth and breastfeeding, but I do completely understand that the emphasis was on the pressure that the ‘natural mother’ rhetoric puts on women. The pioneer of attachment theory, John Bowlby, did indeed underline the importance of the proximity of a child to a caregiver in terms of their emotional development, but he also said that parents are equally “dependent on a greater society for economic provision”, and that society should “cherish” its parents.

As in her previous book, 2020’s Losing Eden (an examination of our disconnection from nature), Jones’s writing is hungry to impart knowledge.Creative, easy and free child-led activities to deepen the connection with the living world, from wild art to simple fires, potions, foraging and make-believe. 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. 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. Generally it seems like the author was, prior to and during her matrescence, securely ensconced in the sort of “feminism” that expects women to desire nothing more (or less or different) than the peak of capitalist achievement, and then those women turn 30 and realise a kid would be nice too, and expect that they can slot that in like taking up knitting. 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.

By the time I'd read the first chapter, I'd resolved to take my son into the woods every afternoon over winter. Lucy’s ability to put words to experiences that I’ve been unable to describe myself is both incredible and the greatest gift. View image in fullscreen Lucy Jones: ‘great on the impossible rules, and the lack of correct information meted out to pregnant women’. By exploring matrescence – the physical, physiological and psychological process of becoming a mother – within this wider context of the natural world, Jones recalibrates ideas of how women are meant to exist and behave during these fast-changing years.My ideologies were challenged, and I came to realise the important role I also play in our community, especially in communicating about motherhood with compassion, understanding, vulnerability, empathy and without judgement. She challenges the ideal of the nuclear family raising children in western societies, when babies are raised by networks of “othermothers” across the world, and in the animal kingdom, including in colonies of bats. 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.