MATRESCENCE

A deep dive into the radical transformation of becoming a mother.

British journalist Jones, author of Foxes Unearthed and Losing Eden, combines memoir, reportage, and social critique in a wide-ranging inquiry into the physical, emotional, and intellectual metamorphoses that women experience during pregnancy and early motherhood. Her first pregnancy, she reveals, was nothing like what she expected. Instead of morning sickness, she had constant nausea; her sense of smell became heightened; she craved salty, fatty foods; and her hair “came loose.” Furthermore, being “inhabited by another person” made her feel psychologically destabilized. The birth was also far different from what she imagined. Undergoing more than 41 hours of labor, she admits, was “the most dramatic and frightening experience of my life.” Her exhaustion intensified after her daughter was born. Breastfeeding constantly to meet the infant’s demands, she never slept more than a few hours at a time. She was frustrated because her baby kept losing weight, felt guilty for supplementing breast milk with formula, and was confused by conflicting advice about how to handle a baby’s sleeping and feeding. Alone with her daughter, who often cried inconsolably, she felt isolated; although she had visits from a health worker, she found herself unable to ask for help. Causes for postnatal depression, she discovered, include profound biochemical changes, lack of support networks for new mothers, and a flawed model of intensive motherhood, which overemphasizes a mother’s responsibility for her child’s health and development and leaves mothers feeling “stress, burnout, and guilt.” Now a mother of three, Jones feels that she is emerging from “matrescent angst.” Motherhood, she writes, “tested my empathy to the limit, it challenged me intellectually, it required me to answer and ask questions constantly, to consider metaphysics and the origins of matter.” Complex and “breathtakingly challenging,” it changed her forever.

An intimate, insightful memoir.