Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

“There is so much parenting content that’s like, what would a good mom do? Or is it normal to do this? Or I confess that I hide from my kids. I want to move beyond that and let’s just take it for granted that we all do that,” she said.

The changes the pregnant brain undergoes have been underestimated, Hoekzema told me, “as hormones and their impact often are, and thought of as something akin to an extreme menstrual period, while this is of course on a completely different scale.” It is likely the most drastic endocrine event in human life. But people think of new motherhood as ma

The toddler wanted to be carried, like the baby, into the store, but I persuaded her to walk with the promise of choosing flower bulbs to buy. It worked for a few seconds but, once inside, she lay on the cold cement floor howling. I picked her up on one side of my body and slotted her between my hip and rib cage. I could just about carry both. I wa

in a society with a focus on competition, capital and accumulation, optimizing children fits right into neoliberal economics. There is an unnecessary, insidious cruelty to the societal construction of motherhood. An “invisible violence,” as Adrienne Rich puts it.

Unlike other cultures, which treat becoming a mother as a major, traumatic life crisis, with special social rites and rituals, Western societies had been failing to recognize matrescence as a major transition: a transition that involves a whole spectrum of emotional and existential ruptures, a transition that can make women ill, a transition in whi

The modern institution of intensive motherhood silences women, contributes to maternal mental illness, and leaves women too worn out to fight. To fight for what? Potentially transformative policy changes, such as proper maternity leave, flexible working hours, better and more affordable childcare. And even if you don’t have any compassion for new m

Babies and young children look at us with full eye contact, and none of the self-consciousness and shame that comes with adulthood. They “are the R&D department of the human species, the blue-sky guys, while we adults are production and marketing,” as Alison Gopnik, professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, says.[9] No

New research into the neurobiology of parenting and caregiving helps explain why alloparenting succeeds in different cultures. We are learning that a person doesn’t need to be pregnant for the brain to reconfigure into an infant-caregiving brain: hands-on parenting can rewire a male brain in a similar way to the effect of pregnancy and childbirth.

The way we approach reproductive labor—the way we treat mothering bodies and minds—is similar to the way we destroy the living world, habitats, human life, and health and well-being, in the fetish for growth at any cost. We do it all in the service of an extractivist capitalism which uses and exploits “public goods”—human and nonhuman life, in othe