Lucy Jones on matrescence, maternal myths and transformation
How We Live Now with Katherine May:
Lucy Jones on matrescence, maternal myths and transformations
———
This month, Katherine spoke to Lucy Jones about Matrescence, her book about the profound changes wrought by pregnancy and birth. Combining the biological, the social and the political with exquisite writing, this is a radical revision of a subject veiled in forced cosiness and obfuscation.
Listen to the Episode
-
Please note, this is an automated transcript and as a result
there may be errorsKatherine May: [00:00:00] Um, so this month's guest is the wonderful Lucy Jones, uh, with her book, Matrescence. I'm going to check that that's the right way to pronounce it. Um, we are so excited to have her here. Hi, Natasha. Um, and you know, because actually this book has just been a complete runaway and, uh, it has really, I think, given a lot of people permission to talk about, uh, you know, um, Issues that were really affecting them, but which they didn't feel that they could say or mention to anyone.
Katherine May: Now, I am going to move Lucy to the webinar. I think I've done it right this time. Um, how many months in are we to switch into Zoom? And I'm still slightly hoppeton.
Lucy Jones: Hi, Lucy.
Katherine May: Welcome. Thank you so much for joining us tonight. It's so lovely tohave you
Lucy Jones: here. Thank you for having me. Katherine May: Hi everyone. I mean anytime.Katherine May: Um, so why don't we kick off with a little reading and is it pronounced matrescence [00:01:00] because somebody pronounced it matrescence to me recently and it turned me upside down.
Lucy Jones: I've heard it every, I think I've had most iterations, but I've not heard that one yet. I think it's Matrescence. Like, that seems to be the pronunciation that everyone's going with.
Lucy Jones: I mean, it's a word that was coined in the seventies by the late anthropologist Dana Raphael, so she's not alive for us to ask her. But I think it, the way I remember it is it's like adolescence. So, Matrescence. Okay,
Katherine May: yes, yeah. It's the one that makes most sense. It's like, um, Hierophany, which I write about in Enchantment.
Katherine May: Everyone asks me how to say it, and it's like, well, here's my guess, but again, Mercy or Eliade is definitely not with us anymore.
Lucy Jones: One of the words that I use in Matrescence is matrophagy, which is like the act of Eating your own mother. And that was very hard to find out the actual accurate cyber, like maji or, it's, it's, it's like very unclear
Katherine May: maybe.
Katherine May: Okay. [00:02:00] Because I just said macrophage, which would've been like Nigel Farage, which would've been terrible. . Yeah. Ma I know . But yeah. Would you like to start with, with reading a bit from the book to give us a taste? Yeah, sure. Thank you.
Lucy Jones: Um. I think I will just, I will just read the very beginning of the introduction.
Lucy Jones: When a human animal grew inside my body, I started to realise that some hoodwinking had been going on. When she left my body, I noticed more. Pregnancy, then birth, and then big time, early motherhood, simply did not match up with the cultural, social and philosophical narratives I had grown up with, as I felt and saw.
Lucy Jones: did not accord with what I had been taught about women and men, fathers and [00:03:00] mothers. I could not connect my present experience with what I had so far absorbed about the body, the mind, the individual and relational self, and our collective structures of living. At first, I thought that I must be going mad.
Lucy Jones: I searched desperately for ways of understanding what was happening to me. I started to realise that my mind had been colonised By inadequate ideas about womanhood, about motherhood, about value. Even love. There was canker in the roots of my habitat. I'll leave it
Katherine May: there. Do you know what, when I reread that at the weekend I just thought, I could have just had you write that bit and I would have been so delighted and
grateful and I'd have sent you like a happy email to say yes because it captures so much this sense, this, this word hoodwinked I think really, really, really well.
Katherine May: It cuts to the heart of [00:04:00] what I felt when I became, well, even before I became a mother, when I became pregnant, um, immediately. Um, and I, I remember wrestling with this idea of like, do we need to not be told because otherwise we wouldn't do it? Um, and how honest should you be? But I, I think the honesty is, is exactly what we need.
Katherine May: It feels like we've got to a place where we are not very honest. Tell me. When did you feel that you had to write about this?
Lucy Jones: Um, thanks, thanks for saying that. And um, I mean, I got so much as well from your essay, the essay collection that you edited
Katherine May: the best
Lucy Jones: for job. Um, um, when did I. Well, I think in my pregnant, in my pregnancy with my first child, I started writing notes because as a writer, as you all know, I write things down to, it's [00:05:00] all material and I was writing things down to try and make sense of it, because I found the experience Um, really interesting, kind of wild and kind of bewildering, to be plural, like kind of existentially interesting.
Lucy Jones: I also found it much harder than I'd expected. It was a, you know, much wanted. baby, but I was very sick and, um, you know, physically it felt, it felt really challenging. Um, and also I started to see, you know, quite early on, um, the kind of swirling ideologies around pregnancy, birth and early motherhood. Um, I have a, I'm a kind of science ecology, mostly health journalist.
Lucy Jones: So I, I really like science. I write a lot of kind of science based That's not all my work. I'm interested in all sorts of different [00:06:00] ways of thinking about the world. But, um, I was really astounded kind of from the off, how kind of unscientific a lot of the chatbox narratives, a lot of the pressures of modern motherhood, um, whether that was about how to give birth or how to feed your baby or, you know, how to get your baby to sleep or.
Lucy Jones: What a mother should be like. Um, so immediately my kind of spidey senses were going and I was like This is
Katherine May: interesting.
Lucy Jones: And as it, as it, um, as the kind of debate, my baby was born, it just got even wilder. And, you know, it felt, it felt like a very kind of, it felt like a subject that I really needed to write to understand.
Katherine May: And
Lucy Jones: in a way, um, it, it was, um, you know, people sometimes say like, how did you write this book with like three young children? But it [00:07:00] was like a real act of like, psychological survival. Um, so I found, you know, early motherhood so difficult. In where, like, my baby was spectacular, you know, I was very, obviously, you know, very, very grateful, and all those things.
Lucy Jones: Interesting that I have to say that, but, you know. Yeah, but actually, the worst thing is you
Katherine May: probably do. You know, like, you probably have to. reassure people that you, that it's functioning correctly in that sense, that we're not trusted.
Lucy Jones: That's true, yeah. But I was also just really flummoxed by kind of falling into the institution of motherhood and all the social structures and systems and ways of being that, you know, at times I felt was really trying to kind of annihilate me and people around me as well.
Lucy Jones: So I kind of, I needed to write it to In a way, save myself and work out why I [00:08:00] felt so
Katherine May: completely strange for so long. Yeah, and you took, you took, you refer it to like being expected to fall in line with this. Unreal vision and I, it just reminded me of how completely Kafkaesque it felt, actually, that you land in this system, you are like a beetle on its back anyway, you're suddenly kind of much more helpless than you're used to being.
Katherine May: And the way you're treated is, In many ways just completely bizarre, like I couldn't fathom even what was expected of me and it seemed very clear that nothing was right. Like whatever I did, you know, I couldn't ever get a tick for my behaviour. And it was probably the time in my life that I most wanted a tick for my behaviour actually, like I wanted Reassurance, and reassurance was incredibly hard to come by and, you know, we're, yes, we're interacting with a crumbling system, [00:09:00] but it felt like more than that.
Katherine May: It felt cultural and about the way that Western women are seen in, in their matricence, in their maternity.
Lucy Jones: That's so well, and I relate. hard. Um, they're, they're, I think it was, it's the academic Susan Douglas and Meredith, something Meredith, they, they talk about the psychological police state of motherhood, kind of, um, environment and landscape where You're suddenly very aware of what you say and, and, and judgment and, and, you know, like you say, needing to get things right.
Lucy Jones: Um, but it was super, I found it so helpful to kind of look back at the history of, you know, child rearing manuals, which essentially are mother rearing manuals and how this industry of kind of intensive motherhood and intensive child [00:10:00] rearing, um, grew and kind of how kind of. You know, often male experts would be giving advice and, and, you know, as the village dissolves, um, post industrialization, and we're much more optimized and in our nuclear families and nuclear boxes, um, you know, instead of having intergenerational, um, you know, contact, which I know I'm not trying to romanticize that.
Lucy Jones: Everyone wants that. But you know, then, then you know, it's the internet and it's the books and it's the experts that we turn to for advice and you know, it's, it, it can be very confusing. But then, and at the same time I told you, just trust your instinct. what
Katherine May: instinct? I've never
Lucy Jones: looked, I
Katherine May: think my instinct was to run as far as I could. Lucy Jones: Yeah. But that it's so naturalized. I think that, Katherine May: yeah.Lucy Jones: You know, it's like this, this myth. I think as a society we put. We project so [00:11:00] much of our, you know, social anxieties, our fears, our kind of infantile needs on mother, on the mother figure. Mothers are carrying so much of our
Katherine May: And we never realised how confused mothers were until we became them.
Katherine May: I mean, I, I'm pretty sure our mothers felt exactly the same way. And there's a, there's a real shift in perspective that happens that thinks, Oh, wow, like you come into this with no expectations.
Katherine May: It's huge. I mean, you, you kind of compare it to other, this shift that happens to the other big shifts that happen in our lives, you know, we acknowledge adolescence as this huge transitionary time that's fraught with emotion and hormones and biological changes. And yet, here's another one coming right at us.
Katherine May: And it's, it's sort of the, the [00:12:00] radical nature of it is pretty much unacknowledged, I
Lucy Jones: think. Absolutely. And I think that adolescence comparison, for me, it was really
Katherine May: transformative.
Lucy Jones: Until, I think I, I, I read the word matrescence in an article in the NewYork Times by Alexandra Sachs, when my baby was about nine months old.
Katherine May: Right.
Lucy Jones: But before that, it's interesting you mentioned Kafka, like the only, text or book I could find myself in was Kafka's Metamorphosis. I really felt like I had gone through something and that my, my first child was born in 2016. And at that point there was, I knew nothing about The fact my brain would be changing shape in multiple areas, I knew nothing of the extreme seismic endocrinological hormonal changes that happen.
Lucy Jones: I knew very little of the actual, you know, the risks of mental health issues in early motherhood and actually kind of how common they are. how badly we look [00:13:00] after them, um, women who have them or birthing people who have, but, um, reading this word, matrescence, which was described in this article as being like adolescents made me think, well, that's why, you know, I remember as an adolescent feeling so kind of out of sorts and I was becoming something and you like that beetle and realizing that actually that's what was happening to me in early motherhood.
Katherine May: Um,
Lucy Jones: And, but you know, but in a very different way. And of course it's different for every individual, but I think becoming a mother in our society, our kind of patriarchal late capitalist society, has a lot of very different kind of pressures and, um, really cruel, uh, really cruel aspects to it actually. Um, but that was a transformative moment of like, okay, that's what was, that's what's happening to me.
Lucy Jones: And that's okay.
Katherine May: Yeah. I mean, I, I've been writing about celebration [00:14:00] lately, and I've been thinking about rites of passage, and as I did my, you know, I did my basic sociological research on rites of passage and, you know, thought about the very fundaments of that term. And I, I was reading this very dry book on it and I found myself suddenly really upset because one of the things that struck me was that I had not had the opportunity to see motherhood as a rite of passage.
Katherine May: That there hadn't, There had been nothing that helped me that like, obviously, you know, there was medical help, but medical help is not the same as the kind of spiritual, emotional, social holding of you as you change. And in fact, I felt like the society I was in almost explicitly rejected my change or told me that it wasn't happening or that it didn't matter, and that it was easy, and that it was natural, and it was instinct.
Katherine May: And it, [00:15:00] it really hit me, even all these years later, it suddenly hit me like a, you know, like a sledgehammer, that I, that I missed this chance to not enjoy the transition, but to go mindfully into this transition with, with a society of other people around me who understood it.
Lucy Jones: You put that so beautifully, and I, I so resonate, and I, I feel really strongly about kind of rituals and rites and that we're really missing that in kind of dominant society in the global north.
Lucy Jones: Um, when I, I, I, I ordered the original essay where Matrescence was coined and written about by Dana Raphael in the seventies, and she was an anthropologist and she wrote about how in most cultures and societies across the world, There is this sense of a newborn mother. So, um, she mentions the Tikopia people who don't just say a baby is born, they say a mother [00:16:00] is born too.
Lucy Jones: And of course, lots of cultures and societies have, um, you know, rites and rituals in order to hold the newborn mother. So that could be, you know, different, um, you know, ways of, you know, nurturing the mother in the immediate postpartum period or closing of the bone ceremony or kind of different confinement periods which I don't want to romanticize that.
Lucy Jones: I know, it's like, you know, it sounds really intense, but I think that we, we are missing something by having a kind of ritual or a right for mothers and indeed fathers and non binary parents to, to hold them in that space. Because like you say, it's It's interesting that you started with celebration. I think there is, there's something that happens where like the mother can be like very erased by [00:17:00] our culture and society.
Lucy Jones: And one of the, um, I'll end on this but my dad is an Anglican priest, and I was talking to him about this subject and kind of wondering about rituals and rites and he mentioned this thing called churching. So, like, back in the day, um, Christianity had this, um, this rite, rite of passage called churching where there was a kind of, it's in the Book of Common Prayer, so a woman would be, um, basically, it would be kind of marked that she'd, you know, come through, you know, the dangers of birth, giving safe passage, like the pains of birth, like it being a big thing, being, you know, marked in a kind of church.
Lucy Jones: You know, I have lots of issues with the Christianity that I was brought up in. And I think there's a kind of unclean element to that ritual, which is not great, but there was something on those words. And in that, you know, which I thought that would have been kind of nice to have. Yeah, like a reintegration.
Lucy Jones: And yeah, [00:18:00] just an acknowledgement. And I think that's, that's partly why I think the word matrescence and this concept is, can be so helpful and transformative, even for people. Um, you know, decades after becoming mothers or parents, we could say to adolescents as well, to
Katherine May: know that you actually did go through something.
Katherine May: Yeah. In fact, there's a couple of comments. I don't know if you can see them at the side, but one person saying, um, uh, I never heard the word before. And I was, and I was simply expected to give birth, find a childminder and go back to work ASAP. And she said, reading your book has helped me lay some ghosts to rest, you know, and I, um, I think they are true and Beth saying, um, you know, after becoming a mother I experienced a long period, years of really not knowing who I was or feeling like myself.
Katherine May: It's, it's so common this, I mean, and you talk about this. This fast shift in identity, this kind of dissolving of the self, not in the kind of positive [00:19:00] psychedelic way that Michael Pollan writes about, but in the, in a really, what feels quite, I felt to me, quite destructive, that everything that I knew about myself was gone, that I had no footholds.
Katherine May: Is that, from your research, would you say that that is, you know, Biological or psychological? Like, is that an artefact of our culture or is that something that will happen whatever, wherever you give birth in whatever era?
Lucy Jones: That's such an interesting question. Um, I I've been quite surprised since Publishing matrescence, how common this experience of a feeling of disintegration or dissolving or kind of falling apart seems to be.
Lucy Jones: And I imagine it's a real heady mix of bio, psycho, social reasons. Um, I was really interested. to learn about the different areas of the brain which change through the massive event of [00:20:00] pregnancy and then birth and new motherhood. One of the areas of the brain which changes is the default mode network, which where memory, autobiography, um, kind of sense of self, um, stuff happens.
Lucy Jones: And one, one of the researchers said those changes kind of affect the neural basis of the self. And that really kind of stuck with me. I wish I'd known that before. Um, because for a long time I was like, there must be something very wrong with me. If this most happiest, you know, natural. moment and I'm feeling like I'm having this existential crisis.
Lucy Jones: It was really helpful to like look at the brain images and read the brain research and be like, Okay, actually something major has happened. And we know that, um, there are significant brain changes, of course, with fathers and, um, non [00:21:00] gestational mothers, of course, with adoptive parents as well. The child, the baby, changes the brain.
Lucy Jones: It elicits changes in the brain. So we, you know, the brain, the neuroscience can tell us a bit about that. But I think that, um, I, I am, I think that a lot of people experience this kind of existential Yeah,
Katherine May: that's, that's right. Existential is exactly the word, isn't it?
Lucy Jones: Yeah, and I think there's some really interesting existential work, um, by Claire Arnold Baker and kind of quite, uh, kind of emerging, looking at the existential side of motherhood because, um, it's, you know, it is, Kind of a big deal bringing an actual life into the world.
Lucy Jones: Like I think for me I had to go through this like, you know, acceptance of the risk of that, of the, you know, the mortality, you know, aspect. It, [00:22:00] it's a, it's a kind of, you know, terrifying experience. But then I think, and I'll end on, um, I think that a lot of patriarchal motherhood, um, wants to, you know, that there's an oppressive crushing side to patriarchal motherhood, where because we don't have the structures and system of, um, wider childcare or A village where we can take responsibility for our children, you know, the children in our society, though that, you know, the ultimately the work is going on most often a woman at home in early motherhood.
Lucy Jones: And, you know, we haven't, that hasn't evolved. Certainly not as quickly as, you know, them, so I'm going on a bit. I will finish. No, no, you're
Katherine May: not. It's really interesting. We need it. We need
Lucy Jones: it. Like one of the things that really shocked [00:23:00] me was how, um, you know, and I'm coming at this from a place of like great privilege, like social material privilege.
Lucy Jones: And, you know, I have that. very much benefited from the like work of feminists over decades, centuries, but who have won, you know, rights for women in the, in the workplace and, and, you know, also reproductive rights and so on. But I think that the one area which is like, It almost felt like I was just walking into the 50s again, like the kind of, um, the kind of cultural norms around motherhood today, I think are actually even more oppressive than they were when my mum was raising me in the 80s.
Katherine May: You write about maternal ambivalence and I felt very strongly when Bert was small that my mother's generation were, had, had permission to express their ambivalence much [00:24:00] more than I did. I mean, I do, like, I have switched social classes and that is a big change as well. Like, working class mums are rude to their kids all the time and we all understand it's a joke and that's like the culture, you know.
Katherine May: Like, it would be, it would be seen as a bit of an affront to brag about your child and I do, like, I was a bit shocked entering middle class society and how people talk about their precious little children and how perfect they are. I was like, oh, that felt like a, to me, that's like a transgression of good manners to do that.
Katherine May: From my, you know, from my very sort of North Kent working class culture. But I did, I just felt really, it seemed really clear to me that, that my mum and her friends were able to just be more honest, whereas I was expected to present and to, to also be the kind of god like responder to my child. You know, I was not a mother, I was like an educator and a shaper of a fragile mind.
Katherine May: That felt like a lot, frankly. [00:25:00]
Lucy Jones: I think that this, this kind of intensive motherhood is, it really helped me to go back to like people like John Bowlby and like the kind of architects of attachment theory and
Katherine May: you know,
Lucy Jones: the people who kind of this idea of, you know, intensive parenting is kindof, you know, It's not though, is it?
Lucy Jones: It's such a misunderstanding of attachment theory. Absolutely. And because, and Bowlby was so clear that it, it, this is not a job for one person or, to people alone. You know, wider society has to help parents raise young children and raise, you know, but, you know, because of neoliberal economics, austerity, the stripping of the welfare state, um, the way our cities and towns are designed, um, [00:26:00] it has It has removed those connections and kind of the ecologies of care that we all really need.
Lucy Jones: I didn't, I don't think I, I had. I was very naive, I don't think I realised until having children and entering that institution of motherhood, how separate the private and the public sphere still are. Yeah, yeah.
Katherine May: How,
Lucy Jones: you know, how hidden and invisible, um, you know, raising children is, or any caregiving for the vulnerable, you know, and how topsy turvy our world is, and how we don't value, value care.
Lucy Jones: But in the same breath, kind of hollow shallowly, glorifying, you know,
Katherine May: caregivers or, or the right kind of caregivers, the kind of the angelic kind. Um, probably not the kind of caregiver like me who, you know, wanted to get back to [00:27:00] work and actually, like, I, I couldn't, but, um, I was desperate to just, to, yeah, just to have a break from it.
Katherine May: It was. It was just super intense, which is what it is. Um, I wanted to ask about the sensory changes that happen during pregnancy and after, which that was something that I hadn't clocked. Like I, you know, I'm autistic, so my sensory dial is always turned up to a million. Um, but I, I noticed it getting even worse during pregnancy, um, but I, I hadn't understood that that can continue after birth as well, this, these levels of sensitivity, that's fascinating.
Lucy Jones: Yeah, so that's been a really big, a big one for me, really big journey for me, um, and I, one of the, um, there's a researcher called Helena Vissing. She's a fantastic somatic psychotherapist and she's recently published a book [00:28:00] called Somatic Maternal Healing, which I really recommend to anyone who is interested in this area.
Lucy Jones: Um, and she talks about kind of how the nervous system for the mother is really altered by pregnancy and birth. And, um, there is this kind of hyper vigilance, which, um, you know, is partly to do with the brain changing, you know, the huge impacts of pregnancy and birth, you know, all the different changes that are happening.
Lucy Jones: Um, and obviously, sometimes that can tip into clinical anxiety for some people, as it did for me. Um, but there is, I think that we're really early in this. Um, in this field of kind of sensory, um, matrescence, like, you know, my book is very personal. It's very much about me and my experience. And my experience has been that, um, yeah, I, I have [00:29:00] received, I've got a neurodivergence.
Lucy Jones: Diagnosis now and I, I'm trying to make sense of it. Welcome. Katherine May: Congratulations.
Lucy Jones: Yeah. Electricity of every living thing. Me and you know, it's been really big. Yeah. I don't really know how to talk about it yet. I'm still really processing. You don't have to. There's no need to process.
Katherine May: Yeah. It takes a while.
Katherine May: Took me about seven years, but don't worry about it.Lucy Jones: That's good to know. I think, yeah, it's been, um, Yeah, I think this is quite, anyway, um, yeah, thank goodness for earplugs is all I can say.
Katherine May: Yeah, well, I've just, I've just been lucky enough to read a proof of Alice Vincent's new book, which is about sound. Um, and she writes about, uh, sort of heightened sensory, um, sensitivity after birth as well. And I, you know, I reread your book this week for the [00:30:00] interview and read hers in the same week, and it was so interesting to hear those two chiming together.
Katherine May: It's obviously yet another hidden experience. Can you repeat the title of the somatic healing book? Someone's asking. So, um, let's, let's make sure people can get it if they need it.
Lucy Jones: Yeah, I'm going to just write it in the chat. It's Somatic Maternal Healing by Helena Vissing.
Katherine May: Excellent. And Beth, you're asking about the book that I just read.
Katherine May: It's not actually out yet, but I will get it on the podcast when it comes. It's a long way off. Yeah. I've got so many things to ask you and so little time I'm beginning to, to mildly panic. Um, and I just wanted to invite anyone in the, in the chat, please do ask questions too. If you can put them in the question box, that makes it easier for me to not miss them.
Katherine May: Um, I'll try and make Lucy Jones: it shorter. I'm a bit of a, no, no,
Katherine May: no, it's fine. We, I do this every time. Like I take about five pages of notes and then get to a quarter of them because it's just always so interesting. So no, it's not you. It's me. [00:31:00] It's my book club habits. Let's talk about birth, because Rebecca's commented that, you know, she really, really, really responded to that.
Katherine May: You go there, with birth. Again, like, something that I feel was hinted at, but not really fully explained. And there was, you know, I, I, I remember being encouraged to, you know, make a playlist for giving birth and thinking about my, you know, the atmosphere of the room. And it was so obvious afterwards that that was, that was just on cue.
Katherine May: That was just busy work for me. Like nobody had any intention. Um, yeah. Tell me about how you approach writing I'm fascinated about it from a writerly perspective because Those are, you know, writing about the state of one's undercarriage after birth is not an easy thing to do, genuinely, and you did it so well, but how did you approach that and what [00:32:00] decision points did you, did you make?
Lucy Jones: Yeah, well, I think the first thing I actually wrote at all was, The first birth story, I wrote it when my daughter, my first child, was three months old for some such stories, um, and it was extremely cathartic for me and I, I was basically writing it in my head, you know, like, In those early months, I think, probably looking back, I don't know, but I might have had some PTSD like symptoms, or at least I, perhaps it's that I needed to talk my birth story out and there was, you know, it was just like, Oh, you've, been through 45 hours of labor, whatever, like just feed the baby.
Lucy Jones: Um, but so I wrote this essay, which I think was picked up in the Guardian and I got a response to it, like, I think I'd never really got with my writing. I, I, um, [00:33:00] I, I, it was really encouraging. Um, and I think I, you know, essentially what I was trying to do with the book and the birth passages was to simply write it as it was.
Lucy Jones: um, and to be as accurate as possible and to, to record what had happened. Um, and
Lucy Jones: I think they probably, you know, for some people they might be I do go there, you're right. Um, but I, and I suppose one of the things which was fueling that was a sense of out, kind of outrage. Like a kind of sense that in very many of the people I was talking to, we knew or talked to had had some, you know, some difficulty with birth or,
you know, had found it not in [00:34:00] any way like the way it had been presented to us as, um, and You know, on top of that, you've got all the taboos around the female body, the maternal body, you know, all the different areas of the body.
Lucy Jones: Uh, and I, I, I just think that's so unhelpful for all of us. You know, we, the more we can just say things and, you know, be more open about the effect of these things. Uh, you know, I think, you know, there's a paternalistic and patronizing culture around. Birth. And I understand that, you know, we, I really get the, you don't want to scare anyone, particularly someone who's pregnant.
Lucy Jones: And, you know, I definitely wanted to kind of put a filter up, but at the same time, I think giving people more information about the risks of birth and all the different, there's just so much ideology. And I got a, [00:35:00] Just a real thing about ideology.
Katherine May: Well, a lot of the book is about how information is presented and handed down and how patronising it often is.
Katherine May: I had to chuckle halfway through you talking because Beth posted that she wrote an essay about how Cormac McCarthy's violent books prepared me for labour, but I'm going to read that, Beth. I can well see it. It's brilliant, it is brilliant. Yeah, blood and guts. And, you know, things like understanding that stitches are actually normal, um, rather than a failure.
Katherine May: Um, like, I, when I was, when I was pregnant, I avoided this class, but there was a local yoga class that a friend went to, where women were encouraged to come back after they'd had their babies, and they were applauded if they had no stitches, and if they hadn't had pain relief. Oh. And I just can't. Imagine a more toxic culture around this, like this [00:36:00] war that women go, like it's like a, you go in as a warrior, it's, it should be applauded that you've made the effort.
Lucy Jones: I just, I can feel that in my like stomach and chest, angry and I see it even on the, some of the birth teams that I still follow the infographics, you know, be like, you know, no stitches or whatever. I
Katherine May: It
Lucy Jones: really gets my goat that there is this culture where Someone gives birth and then they're made to feel like a failure.Katherine May: Yeah,
Lucy Jones: it's after all you've gone through. It's grotesque. Like to go through that, however you give birth, it's, you know, traumatic for the body. You know, even if it is, you know, a good birth, it's still a big thing to go through. And, um, I just think it's utterly grotesque
Katherine May: that we Yes, I agree. I would like to share with everyone, I have many stitches.
Katherine May: and nothing's the same shape [00:37:00] anymore, and that's just how it went for me. Wasn't fun, but uh, but there we go. I had a baby at the end of it, which I'm very grateful for.
Katherine May: Yeah,
Lucy Jones: it's, it's a lot. I had to have an operation after one of mine and still, and still dealing with the consequences of that. And you know, I think there's so much in the birth conversation that I think isn't spoken about.
Lucy Jones: There's, you know, for me, it wasn't just that I'm You know, I wanted to write it as accurately as possible and that meant that a lot of it is quite, you know, very intense. It was also interesting, you know, it was like horrific and most of the time I was in like shocking pain and it was the worst and the best days of my life.
Lucy Jones: But it was also like, as a writer, I was like, how is this? How would I describe this?
Katherine May: What words would I use?
Lucy Jones: What would I compare this to? [00:38:00] You know, we never get that, but we are. But it also, I guess it makes everything, you could say, Oh, I can write about this. It makes it a bit easier. Um,
Katherine May: I feel, I feel huge gratitude for that actually, because I think it helped me to process it and yeah, to reach out and to, to just think through the, what happened.
Katherine May: Um,
Lucy Jones: and you know, what's really cool. There are a lot of kind of new mother, um, writing groups. I feel there's a lot of those starting up or maybe going for a while. So I think, you know, writing, crafting, making, creating, you know, even if you can't speak about what your work looks like or anything, if that feels really positive way of like, People getting together and processing.
Katherine May: I contributed to a book last year called The Maternal Journal, which was about encouraging, uh, women to, uh, or, you know, and actually, I don't think it was just women. I think they were thinking really broadly about parents to, um, to journal their experiences and to give them prompts. And I, [00:39:00] you know, all of those things are so healthy.
Katherine May: Um, before we turn to questions, I think we should tackle breastfeeding because I think that's the one, that's the other big one, isn't it? Um, that feels like tide is turning on a little. Um, there is, I felt huge pressure to breastfeed and I was unable to and I felt huge shame about that and I was treated very poorly by some other mothers for for not making, not making that choice.
Katherine May: Um, I had a friend whose child was taken into hospital because she tried to persist with breastfeeding and the child was You know, so dehydrated and even then the midwife took them to a side corridor and whispered, I can't tell you this but you need to go and buy formula. We, I feel like we've created a really toxic culture around something that could be very beautiful and is for so many people.
Katherine May: [00:40:00] Um, again, something else you were really honest about, which is, it feels dangerous still to be honest about, about breastfeeding. Um, tell me where you got with that. Like, how did, how did it feel to write about it? And, um, where do you think we are with it?
Lucy Jones: Yeah, um, I'm really sorry that. That happened to you as well, that's shocking and not unlike many stories I've heard.
Lucy Jones: Um, yeah, it was, it was, it was quite hard to write about the breastfeeding stuff because, um, you know, even now, I think now, even now, now I know that, you know, I had a physiological reason why I couldn't really breastfeed. And, um, uh, you know, it's still, I still carry quite a lot of shame and guilt. You know, I wrote this piece for the Times around that time about feeding and I got so, I got a lot of letters from [00:41:00] women who'd had their babies like 30, years before who were still holding shame.
Lucy Jones: Um, I think that it's kind of similar in a way to, to kind of what we talked about a bit before. you know, the kind of dominance of an ideology, um, kind of, um, an idea of, uh, an idea of what society wants a mother to be. Um, and you know, the fact is that, Where you are told Antenatally that you have to breastfeed and exclusively for at least six months and anyone can do it.
Lucy Jones: And it's, this is what I was told. Yeah, that just you, you can get support, but you know, you'll always have enough milk and demand, blah, blah, blah. But actually
I think it's 1% of. [00:42:00] Um, new mothers are breastfeeding after six weeks or something.
Katherine May: Wow.
Lucy Jones: Wow. There's a lot, there's a lot going on here. Um, I actually mixed fed.
Lucy Jones: I did formula and breastfeeding and you never hear anything about that. I don't know how much breast milk my kids are actually getting, but you know, that's kind of like taboo combination feeding, I think. Um, but again, I think it's another area where maternal mental health is so ignored. Slow down the mix.
Lucy Jones: Yeah, I remember with my second child, I had these problems where I, I just couldn't seem to make enough milk. And I remember being told, um, to do a kind of feed. Feed, pump, feed, top up, pump regime overnight. So to feed and then to top up and then to pump. So that would mean I'd probably have got like two or three blocks of sleep, like [00:43:00] four minute sleeps.
Lucy Jones: And I really considered it. I'd had postnatal and I just thought, actually, you know, I also exist. Oh my god, radical assertion. It really feels like that, doesn't it? I think there's something so like mother abnegating, I don't know how you pronounce that, about so many of these kind of very blunt, clumsy policies, you know, like baby friendly hospitals.
Lucy Jones: What's the matter in that? I
Katherine May: appeared on a podcast recently where the interviewer was pumping breast milk as she interviewed. And I felt so sorry for her, you know, she looked so tired and drained. And I just wanted to hug her and say, like, this is torture, isn't it? This is just absolute torture. You can't do all of this.
Katherine May: This is horrible. And I [00:44:00] Yeah, I, I worry that the technology of the breast pump has added a whole other level of, you know, pressure and expectation and exhaustion to women's lives. It's just so much.
Lucy Jones: I cannot imagine having to use that blasted breast pump in an office. I found the breast pump very, well it didn't work, and it sounded really horrible.
Lucy Jones: Um,
Katherine May: yeah. We're always going to gaze into the middle distance now. Um,there is a brilliant question from Emma that's going to help us to look, feel a bit more
positive at the end of this because Yeah, I think we need to think about what we can do. And Emma says, you know, she became a mother 20 years ago.
Katherine May: How can we better support the people in our families and communities as they become mothers and parents? Like, where, where is the hope? What can we do? How can we do this better?
Lucy Jones: [00:45:00] I think that, um, someone mentioned this in an event I did, and I think they're absolutely right. I think saying to someone, you know, what do you need?
Lucy Jones: Like, you know, what can I do? What, is there anything I can do? Or, you know, things like, you know, I think it is very individual what people need, but something that, that I found when I went through my omatrescence was like a real craving and a yearning for kind of older women. And also, You kind of, kind of like you were saying earlier, Katherine, like a sense of, you know, wanting reassurance and, um, Just not having to make it up from scratch.
Lucy Jones: Yeah, and a kind of support and, you know, someone to kind of hold the bait. Like my, my father in law would take the baby out for a walk sometimes so I could have a nap. And I was really sleep deprived and really that got me through. Um, um, I think, yeah, asking what people [00:46:00] need and just kind of acknowledging that, you know, they exist too, like, you know, making them some food or those kind of things are big.
Lucy Jones: They make a big difference. Yeah, it's really huge.
Katherine May: I think that, I think there's a, for me, there's like a bigger societal question here about how we live. You know, the, we've been writing in sociology about the privatised nuclear family for a long time now. Um, it feels like this time might be the perfect storm of like the worst.
Katherine May: I mean, particularly for women who gave birth during the, the pandemic. I mean, that, that's, that's is unthinkable, honestly. I think, I think the trauma of that weighs very heavily on a lot of people. Um, but I, it feels to me like there's this perfect storm, as you say, late capitalism, um, influencer culture, uh, An [00:47:00] even more privatised family than before, like, and also this kind of dissolution of our cultural mechanisms for support.
Katherine May: Um, you know, loads of us have walked away from organised religion. What replaces that? Where are we welcome in whatever state that we turn up with? I
could go on and on and on. It feels like not a lot can change until a load of bedrock changes too. Absolutely.
Lucy Jones: You put that so well. And I think, um, I think it's Andrea O'Reilly, the amazing, um, motherhood studies founder, Matricentric Feminism.
Lucy Jones: She said that, you know, it's interesting that women, win these kind of economic rights and rights in the workplace. And then, then you get this kind of social, uh, intensive motherhood thing coming in to make sure women feel guilty that you can't win. [00:48:00] Like whatever you do, you're going to feel like you're failing in some way, one of your roles.
Lucy Jones: Um, I think that there is. The kind of norms and psychological police state around the experience of maternal subjectivity and the experience of being a mother today is very strong. But if it can be broken down, there is this, and I've seen this in people writing to me since publishing Matrescence, there's this reservoir.
Lucy Jones: of like rage and desire for connection and desire for it to be different and not wanting to do things in these little nuclear boxes and, um, and, and, and, and, you know, a sense that we've got things wrong. Um, I think that, you know, the, the, the kind of dogma and the, the rule that you have to, you know, fall in line about motherhood, even while we're talking in this [00:49:00] chat, you know, there's a voice in my head saying, you make sure people know that you love your children or, you know, it's a really big privilege to be a mother, but that is so strong that it's suppressing.
Lucy Jones: Organizing and, and activity. And if we can bring that out, you know, then, you know, like, like, for example, you know, women who have children often work part time and then they're penalized in their pensions. So there's like, we're basically punished by society for having children. You know, we don't value caregiving.
Lucy Jones: So it's not, you know, we don't financially reward it. There are all these little things that I think if we do more consciousness raising,
Katherine May: It's back to that 70s thing. We need to, we all need to sit in circles and share, you know, our stories. And, and actually it's been interesting seeing that happen in the chat.
Katherine May: Like it's, there's a wellspring there of people just want to say, [00:50:00] I had a really bad time and it was like this. And, and I, like we can hear each other's stories. We can take that actually. I think what is, So painful is the, is the unknown. And, and you've written recently about loneliness, which I think is, is such a defining quality of, of modern parenthood is feeling lonely and isolated.
Lucy Jones: Definitely. And I think that goes back to what you were saying about this feeling of, you know, common feeling of disintegration. And I'm sure, you know, loneliness has something to do with that. You know, that so many people experience, but, um, yeah, I don't think it, it doesn't serve. You know, it is serving powerful interests to keep us separate and to keep us ashamed and silent.
Lucy Jones: Um, and I'm really, um, kind of excited, empowered by, and I'm sure, you know, every generation has to do this and, um, you know, the circles [00:51:00] and the groups and the kind of intergenerational groups I'm seeing and, you know, women getting together and, and people getting together to share and to, galvanise. Yeah,
Katherine May: yeah, you're right.
Katherine May: It's a, it's a movement and you are right at the, at the head of it. I just congratulate you so much on expressing what you've expressed and, and the courage that that must have taken because it is, it's not easy and, and just thank you. It's just been so
Lucy Jones: great to talk to you. so much for having me and thank you everybody.
Katherine May: Oh, thank you. Thank you to everyone who's been here. Thank you to everyone who's listening later. Um, we are just, we're really glad to talk about this stuff. Um, next month we're swerving a bit and we're talking to Oliver Berkman, who I don't think is going to say a word about his vagina, I'm just saying.
Katherine May: Um, I think, I think it's going to be, you know, He's going to be talking about meditations for everyday life. Abrupt shift in [00:52:00] tone, but we can, we can hold both. Um, Lucy, thank you so much. And I hope to speak to you again another time.
Lucy Jones: Thank you very much. Bye bye.
Show Notes
This month, Katherine spoke to Lucy Jones about Matrescence, her book about the profound changes wrought by pregnancy and birth. Combining the biological, the social and the political with exquisite writing, this is a radical revision of a subject veiled in forced cosiness and obfuscation.
Lucy's frankness and curiosity - her utter realness - are an absolute balm for anyone who’s navigated the very particular environment of contemporary western maternity, whether that contact has been personal or at one remove. It helps us to understand why pregnancy feels like such a hinterland, and also why it doesn’t need to be this way.
Katherine's book, Enchantment, is available now: US/CAN and UK
Links from the episode:
Lucy's Instagram
Lucy's website
Lucy’s book, Matrescence
Please consider supporting the podcast by subscribing to my Substack where you can join these conversations live!
To keep up to date with How We Live Now, follow Katherine on Instagram and Substack
———
Enchantment - Available Now
“Katherine May gave so many of us language and vision for the long communal ‘wintering’ of the last years. Welcome this beautiful meditation for the time we’ve now entered. I cannot imagine a more gracious companion. This book is a gift.”
New York Times bestselling author Krista Tippett
