Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

It didn’t surprise me to read that researchers at the University of Massachusetts found, in a synthesis of literature on working mothers, that matrescence was associated with enhanced knowledge, skills and capacity. They found evidence that it “strengthened women’s mindset, willpower, and overall emotional intelligence.”[7] Nothing that I had previ

As I tried to reorient myself, I realized how much of my angst had emanated from an existential crisis. Not in the clichéd sense that I couldn’t find meaning in my life; rather, that the weight of my choices and responsibilities, combined with a new, sustained confrontation with mortality, was bamboozling. This was a world tilted.

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

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

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

It’s promoting breastfeeding because it’s “free” when it can be a full-time job. It’s mothers being offered lower salaries than men or women without children. It’s mothers being less likely to be hired than men or women without children. It’s fathers taking on extra jobs in the evenings, to make up for the loss of a second income. It’s the privatiz

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.

One evening, at the Mothers Talking group, I surprised myself by bursting out in frustration: “So at the time women are most likely to suffer from mental illness we isolate them inside, expect them to match unrealistic human ideals, judge their every move, demand they get their body back after the violence of birth, silence their lived experience,

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