Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood

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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 felt like a bodily unravelling, directly sensory-(but at the same time drawing out new emotions, or, at least for me-unknown to the maternal world). the connection between mental health and the natural world turns out to be strong and deep - which is good news in that it offers those feeling soul-sick the possibility that falling in love with the world around them might be remarkably helpful.

For starters, brief passages that lay out the machinations of nature, and many of its horrors, sit around its chapters.

A phrase far too often used, but this is ‘essential reading’ for everyone - not just mothers or fathers or care-givers, but everyone. 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.

A take-no-prisoners tour-de-force, providing insightful criticism of every social/cultural paradigm surrounding pregnancy/birth/breastfeeding/motherhood in the West. It was as if every conflicting feeling that motherhood brings, in all its wonder and challenge had been put in to a single space.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. Instead, we are expected to get on with it, sublimate all our needs to our new baby, and weather this most fundamental of human shifts without making too much of a fuss. Radical, questioning and profound, it urges us to recognise and honour the many transformations of motherhood. Absolutely agree we need to value mothers more as a society and I found lots of the scientific information extremely interesting.