When my son was an infant, I often imagined getting gently hit by a bus so that I could go to a hospital and get some sleep. I didn’t know that fantasy is so common among mothers of newborns that it has a name. It is accurately, if not creatively, called “the hospital fantasy.”
Everything seeped; exploded diapers inexpertly changed, my C-section scar, milk, sweat, my grip on reality. I existed in a constant blackout-drunk state of exhaustion, a stomach raw from maximum doses of painkillers. And when everyone else was finally sleeping, I was wide awake, with a throbbing sense that I had no idea who I was. Having a baby felt like an emergency. Everything was shaky. Texts with other moms helped, but I didn’t want to bother people who I now understood were extremely busy and extremely tired. So I scrambled alone, reading while the baby napped to try to grasp what was happening to me.
Lucy Jones, a British nature writer and science journalist, had her first baby around the time I did, and dealt with the jarring aftermath about as well as I did, too. It was 2018. We were both nine months into motherhood, both reading furiously to decode our postpartum haze. We both, separately, simultaneously, stumbled across a word that contained much of what we were looking for: “matrescence.” In the 1970s, anthropologist Dana Raphael coined the word to acknowledge the transition to motherhood as a time marked by massive upheaval of identity, rivaling only adolescence in scope and impact. When I became a mother, the term was making the rounds in certain, narrow circles because of a new book by reproductive psychiatrists Alexandra Sacks and Catherine Birndorf called What No One Tells You.
In 2018 matrescence didn’t find a home in the broader Zeitgeist, but Jones let it pull her down a dense intellectual rabbit hole that resulted in the book I wish I’d had then. Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood is a tenderly woven, comprehensive explanation of what happens to us when we grow, birth and care for a baby. In it, Jones interrogates her own fraught matrescences — marked by birth trauma, perinatal depression, intense isolation, and immense love — through the lens of the most current science about what happens to our bodies and minds when we give birth. Matrescence makes the case that the transition to motherhood is the biological, neurological, psychological, and social metamorphosis that it feels like. She meticulously builds to an irrefutable conclusion: Becoming a mother changes us in ways that are external, internal, and lasting, and it is “likely the most drastic endocrine event in human life.”
After reading it, I had the urge to awkwardly thrust the book into the hands of every pregnant person I saw, and to give it to every man I knew who might ever become a father. I wanted — and still want — everyone who never plans to have children to read it so that they’ll understand why and how their friends and colleagues transform when they have babies. This book says out loud, in as many ways as it can be said, that the long-accepted notion that we can “go back” — back to normal, bounce back, get our body back, even our brain back — is a fallacy that can cause real harm.
Jones explains that matrescence begins with growing an organ — the placenta — which pumps out hormones, some at a pace of 200 to 300 times our normal levels, and some of which are entirely new. This hormonal flooding goes on until the mother delivers her baby, at which point it stops abruptly, causing a dramatic and jarring hormonal drop. As the dramatic endocrine changes rock the body, the brain begins to morph as well. Recent research suggests that matrescence is a time of great cognitive plasticity, or adaptability and growth — an idea directly at odds with the stereotypical notion of “baby brain” (when a mother’s thinking becomes clouded and confused). Jones describes how drastically different maternal brain scans are from non-maternal scans. Post-matrescence brains are clearly marked by significant areas of shrunken gray matter and changes in both the folds and grooves in the cerebral cortex.
Although it sounds like a recipe for disaster, these changes do not diminish women — or at least that’s what Elseline Hoekzema, a Dutch neuroscientist who has conducted some of the most groundbreaking work on the maternal brain, assured Jones. Instead, Hoekzema understands the changes as a “fine-tuning” — a synaptic reordering that allows for greater efficiency and helps women adapt to their new circumstances. Shrinking, pruning, and restructuring happen in areas related to the brain’s reward system, which is believed to help mothers bond with their babies, and, most compellingly, in the Default Mode Network, which houses the sense of self. In the third trimester and after giving birth, the DMN undergoes significant changes as the mother’s perception of self as an individual comes undone. It reemerges with a new expansiveness, extending the understanding of “self” to include the baby.
A clinical psychologist who studies psilocybin once told me that the settled “snow globe” of the psyche undergoes a powerful, transformative shake-up when a person trips on a psychedelic drug. As I read about the ways that birthing affects the brain, I kept returning to this idea of transformative psychedelic experiences. My matrescence wasn’t a bad trip, but it wasn’t always a good trip, either. Stepping into motherhood is sort of beautiful, but also a bit disturbing.
In the times after my children were born, I was constantly self-diagnosing the dissociative moments, pings of panic, and waves of euphoria and obsession that dotted my every waking hour. I was sure that it couldn’t possibly be normal to feel this way. But what exactly was wrong with me? I would ask myself: Is this the safe, everybody-gets-them “baby blues” or the much scarier-sounding postpartum depression, which no one wants to have— even though about 20 percent of new mothers do? How many hand sanitizers in the diaper bag pushes one over the line from “good mom” to “person with postpartum OCD?” Was the time I handed the baby to my husband a little too forcefully a sign of impending psychosis?
Back then, it bothered me that celebrities would say they had “postpartum” instead of “postpartum depression” or “postpartum anxiety,” which is presumably what they meant. Now, I think they were on to something. Maybe a postpartum experience that is as full of grief as it is love isn’t something that requires a diagnosis. Maybe what we “have” is simply a time of losing both the rhythms that made up our lives and certain synapses and gray matter in our brains.
In the United Kingdom, Matrescence has already become a bible for a group of predominantly millennial mothers fed up with the status quo. Self-proclaimed matrescence activists have emerged in response to the book’s publication, as has a matrescence zine, and a sold-out matrescence festival (“a place to explore the metamorphosis of m/otherhood”) at which Jones is the headline speaker. Chest-feeding, breastfeeding and bottle-feeding are equally encouraged. There are play spaces and poetry readings. Fostering these kinds of mini matrescence utopias — where women can lean back and talk about motherhood — is precisely what Jones calls for at the end of her book. If we take the time to discuss what really happens when a person has a baby, she claims, we can begin to fade the bounce-back fantasy that has persisted for so long.
After I gave birth, I simply did not know that my identity was in a natural process of becoming forever altered. What would it have been like had I experienced those months with clear eyes? I think I would have been slower to pathologize. And maybe awe could have flooded in.
Related
- What If Motherhood Isn’t Transformative at All?
- Seeking Salvation From Postpartum Anxiety
Miranda Rake , 2024-06-12 18:00:20
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