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

the science of the maternal brain published to date tells us that mothers in this vulnerable period need care, and particularly protective social policies. The one strategy which seems to inoculate most new mothers against mental illness is social support. Social support, according to scientific tools and scales, includes emotional and practical

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,

“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.

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

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

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.

I thought early motherhood would be gentle, beatific, pacific, tranquil: bathed in a soft light. But actually it was hard-core, edgy, gnarly. It wasn’t pale pink; it was brown of shit and red of blood. And it was the most political experience of my life, rife with conflict, domination, drama, struggle and power.

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