Matrescence and the Transformation of Motherhood
Episode 494 | Host: Emilie Aries | Guest: Lucy Jones
Why aren’t we discussing motherhood's enormous physical, mental, and social impacts?
People who have become mothers, and most people who know mothers, will agree that the experience is transformative in the most complex sense of the word. Yet, despite this widespread anecdotal knowledge and a large body of recent research on all the physiological and mental effects, our policies and medical system continue to act as though this process is not their problem.
Lucy Jones is an award-winning journalist and author of four books, the latest of which highlights a term that should be far more well-known than it is: matrescence—literally, the process of becoming a mother. Matrescene: On The Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood intertwines a chronicle of Lucy’s own experience and scientific inquiry into the institution of motherhood.
In our conversation, Lucy and I delve into the disconnect between what people experiencing matrescence know to happen within their bodies and the information available to prepare them for these changes. Whether you’re already a mother, are considering becoming one, or support one in any way, Lucy’s expertise in this area will surely be enlightening and empowering.
Coining the term “matrescence”
We go through a few major life transitions that profoundly—and permanently—impact our mental and physical selves. There’s no shortage of research or conversation around adolescence—a phase well-known for the significant changes it imparts. Likewise, especially in recent years, menopause in all its many forms has been a hot topic. I get into that one in Episode 488, Talking Menopause at Work, with Dr. Jen Gunter.
On the other hand, even just the term “matrescence” isn’t familiar in most circles. It was coined by Dana Rafael, an American anthropologist, in the 70s. She wrote an essay introducing an unremarked but global concept: when a baby is born, a mother is too, and significant existential, physical, psychological, emotional, and social transitions occur.
Like so many soon-to-be mothers, Lucy didn’t think much would change once she became a mother, and as she realized how much did change, it was a huge shock. I can certainly relate, as I’m sure most first-time mothers can. Nine months in, Lucy remembers thinking she would still be the same person and quickly realizing that wasn’t the case.
That very year, Nature Neuroscience published a groundbreaking study that found that pregnancy causes seismic shifts in the human brain just as profound as those that occur in adolescence. In the years since, research has continued to surface with more information about this neurological transformation, including the fact that it doesn’t affect only gestational parents—fathers and non-birthing mothers also experience some anatomical changes that stem from giving hands-on affectionate care for an extended period.
Where are the resources for mothers?
Despite all this knowledge, so little information is available to expectant parents about what to expect. The books just don’t give the whole picture, Lucy says. There was no simple way for her to learn, for example, that she would need to buy weeks worth of pads following the birth of her child. We are also led to believe that lacking innate knowledge about navigating all the new expectations of motherhood is a personal shortcoming. It’s not. It’s a skill set that needs to be taught, and yet the systems that should teach us continue to fail.
We expect new mothers to forego sleep for months on end, Lucy explains, without any societal recognition of the inevitable link between that and the maternal mental health crisis. Running counter to concerns about the declining birth rate and the fresh demonization of “childless cat ladies” is a very hostile environment in which to raise children—one that strongly implies, if not outright states, that despite being the sole source of the public workforce, motherhood and childcare remain conversations that should never leave the nursery.
Building a society that supports matrescence
In this episode, Lucy shares so much shocking research about the mental health changes we go through during matrescence, and we get into the glaring disconnects we continue to face—the battle rages from #tradwives to freezing our eggs, all in the interest of being the “perfect” mother at the perfect time.
Lucy hopes mothers and caregivers leave this conversation knowing they don’t have to do it alone. Communication has poured in since her book came out; sharing stories and information is the right road to dispelling the shame and stigma many of us experience.
Understanding and using the term matrescence in general conversation is another essential part of this discussion. With the vocabulary to explore this natural, eternal, yet endlessly overlooked part of the human experience, we can start to reach out with intention and ask mothers, how is your matrescence going? How can I offer support?
So, how did your matrescence go? If you’ve experienced this rewarding, terrifying, and life-changing experience, what parts of this episode resonated for you? What was different? And if you’re a mom-to-be or considering parenthood, what did you take away from this conversation? To weigh in, visit the Courage Community on Facebook or join our LinkedIn group.
Related links from today’s episode:
Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood by Lucy Jones
Episode 333, An Honest Look Into Motherhood and Health
Episode 488, Talking Menopause at Work
Pregnancy leads to long-lasting changes in human brain structure, Nature Neuroscience
The Birth Of A Mother by Alexandra Sacks
Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution by Adrienne Rich
LEVEL UP: a Leadership Accelerator for Women on the Rise
Find out how you can TAKE ACTION for parental
and other workplace rights:
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[INTRO MUSIC IN]
EMILIE: Hey and welcome to the Bossed Up podcast, episode 494. I'm your host Emilie Aries, the Founder and CEO of Bossed Up. And today I am so excited to share a conversation I just had all about matrescence,
[INTRO MUSIC ENDS]
which if you haven't heard this term before, this is the transformative experience of becoming a mother. You know we talk a lot about adolescence as a similar metamorphosis, but we don't really acknowledge the identity change, the physiological change, the social change, the absolute like, earth shattering changes that go on when you first become a mom.
And luckily a lot of new research, a lot of new conversations and literature have popped up around Matrescence in recent years, including a phenomenal new book written by today's guest, Lucy Jones called Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood. And I'm so excited to introduce you to Lucy, who brings a really interesting scientific background to today's topic. She's an award winning journalist and author of four books including the best selling Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need The Wild, a Times and Telegraph Book of the Year and most recently the Women's Prize, long listed on the Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood, a New Statesman Book of the Year. Her first book, Foxes Unearthed, won the Society of Authors Roger Deakin Award and was longlisted for the Wainwright Prize. Her writing on ecology, health and science has been published by BBC Earth, the Sunday Times, GQ, and the New Statesman, among others.
Lucy is based in Hampshire, in the UK, and brings a perspective of now a three time mother herself with three kiddos. And she chronicles her experiences of matrescence in her book in a way that's part memoir, part scientific inquiry, and part unearthing of the evidence-based research that has come about in recent years, as well as some of the writing from back in the 1970s and prior about the institution of motherhood and how it's still feels quite frankly oppressive to so many women even today. And in some ways more than ever.
I really enjoyed recording this conversation with Lucy on the cusp of the arrival of my second child back in early September. I know you're not hearing this for quite a while after then, but this was the last podcast interview I recorded before going on my maternity leave. So I hope you enjoy today's truly eye opening conversation with Lucy Jones. So without further ado, Lucy, welcome to the Bossed Up podcast.
LUCY: Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here.
EMILIE: I'm very excited to have this conversation, not only because you've written a phenomenal book about this topic, Matrescence, but because I'm almost 37 weeks pregnant, as we speak, on the brink of welcoming my second child into the world, and it just feels like a very timely time to have this conversation.
LUCY: Congratulations, and it's lovely to talk to you at this threshold moment.
EMILIE: Thank you. One of the things I admitted to before we hit record is that I, uh, just had a conversation with my nurse midwife last week and said to her at my appointment, I feel so much better going into pregnancy and childbirth round two, because, you know, matrescence is not on the table like it is with your first child. And she looked at me like, matrescence, huh, like, I need to, like, what a $10 word. I should probably know more about that, I thought, yes, yes, you should.
So why don't we start there? Like, what is matrescence? And how did a science writer like you come to find yourself writing a whole book about this topic?
LUCY: Sure. Thank you. So matrescence means simply the process of becoming a mother. So the word is a bit like adolescence or senescence. And you can hear that kind of metamorphosis within the word. It was coined by the late American anthropologist Dana Raphael in the 1970s. So she wrote an essay where she introduced this concept and idea, which she had seen in many cultures and societies across the world. This sense that when a baby is born, a mother is too, and the mother and the woman, or birthing person, is experiencing a significant transition, a significant existential, physical, psychological, emotional, social change.
And, you know, back then, when she, when she was writing about this concept, she compared what she saw in most cultures to society in the US and global north, where we don't have a sense of a newborn mother in the same way, and rituals and rites. And I discovered that word in an article in the New York Times by the reproductive psychiatrist Alexandra Sacks. And my first child was nine months old. I had gone into motherhood, a much wanted child, and my baby was spectacular, as all babies are, but I had no idea that anything would kind of happen to me, apart from I was a gestational mother. I carried our child.
But my sense was that my body was kind of like a box or a pot, and that she would grow inside me, and then she would be born, and then, you know, I would feed for a bit. But basically me and my husband would be equal, and I'd go back to work as normal, and I'd earn as normal, and I'd be with the same person. And that was so far from the truth and the reality for me that it was a really big shock and I found it in many ways quite difficult. But when I read this word nine months in thinking, you know, going through thoughts like, there must be something really wrong with me. This is meant to be the happiest time of my life, I had quite kind of naive, limited basic ideas of motherhood, you know, I had kind of bought into the maternal ideal, you know, this kind of imperative that you must enjoy every minute. And, you know, that's what I was being told, etc.
But reading that word matrescence and learning that this was a significant developmental stage for me and for all the women around me, was utterly transformative. And I, my shoulders dropped, I breathed. I was like, okay, well, this is why I feel so weird. And, you know, maybe that's okay. I mean, there's lots of things, reasons why the institution of motherhood is not okay in our societies. But, it was a relief to find out, okay, something's happening. And that set me on the journey of researching, you know, what happens, what happens to the brain, what happens to the body, what happens to the mind, what happens to you socially, et cetera.
EMILIE: Yeah. There was a passage you almost referenced just now that really stood out to me. Even during pregnancy, you write, I thought the baby would grow inside my body, as in a flower pot, that I would still be the same person. But that didn't seem to be the case. And that just struck me because the way we talk about adolescence is not, you're gonna be the same person at the end of this transition. It's, this is weird. Uncomfortable at times, kind of smelly, possibly, right? Definitely uncomfortable. Socially awkward. And it's radical change. But we don't talk about matrescence or have the language that's been socially normalized to see becoming a mother as having all those natural similarities of metamorphosis, right?
LUCY: Absolutely that. And, you know, we don't have that understanding yet, or maybe we're starting to get that understanding. We're starting to get a lot more understanding about, know, menopause and, and like you say, we all expect adolescents to feel kind of weird and to need support or to need some kind of nurture. But if you look at matrescence in our society and what happens to mothers when they become women, when they become mothers, there is a significant health element. There's lots of things that can happen mentally, physically, and so on. And so I think actually we've neglected this stage and this transition and that the concept of matrescence kind of illuminates it and allows us to kind of care about each other a bit more and a bit better. To be able to say, like, how's your matrescence? Or how was your matrescence? Or what can I do to support you in your matrescence? Same same goes for patrescence as well. I mean, the fathers, fathers too, of course.
EMILIE: Interesting. And I would love to see more attention there as well. It feels like the next frontier. Why do you think we center the baby, right, in this process as opposed to centering the mother in this process? The arrival of your first child is massive, and it's wonderful, and it's spectacular, and it makes sense that we nurture the baby, but the nurturing of the mother seems to run contrary to what you've alluded to, the institution of motherhood. Can you explain that a little bit more?
LUCY: Sure. It's such a great question. I gave birth to my first child in what's called, in the UK, a baby friendly hospital.
EMILIE: We have those. Yeah.
LUCY: Yeah. And I remember feeling after birth, which was for me, quite a long birthday, it was quite chaotic and violent and painful, as many births are. And I felt quite kind of, abandoned in a way. And I remember thinking at that point, baby friendly, like, where's the mother in that? I understand that obviously babies are of the most vulnerable of all humans and they need all of our care and support. But there is, as Donald Winnicott, the psychoanalyst said, there's no baby without a mother. There's no baby without a birthing person.
And what I noticed in my becoming a mother eight years ago or so, was a pattern of absence around maternal health, proper advice, scientifically evidenced advice, thorough, comprehensive information about what the body needs after birth, about what the body goes through in pregnancy, you know, about risks that can happen in birth, or, you know, simply kind of really simple stuff like, you know, you bleed quite a bit after birth. And books don't really tell you how long that might be or what you might need for that and so on. I remember getting like one box of pads or something thinking, you know, it would be like a period. But I had, you know, I had to order like a box every day for like, four or five weeks or something. That's just what the body goes through.
But I think that with that absence of information and kind of care and concern for the new mother, what I've seen since publishing this book, is that often women will kind of turn it as a, as a sense of shame, you know, if things are feeling big and it's feeling wild to become a mother, but every, no one's kind of thinking about the mother. So then they think there's something wrong with them and they kind of turn in on themselves.
So that's why I think this, this idea, this concept which has been popularized by lots of people before me, is so powerful because it just gives us the word and the language to say, actually matresence is a vulnerable time. It is the most dangerous time actually in a woman's life course for mental health risks, comes with risks to, you know, for depression, different types of mental illness, etc., and we really need to get better at caring for new mothers.
EMILIE: Yeah, absolutely. And I know you had your own diagnosis of postpartum depression with your first. And by the way, so did I. Similar reasoning, I think, based on what I've seen around feeding challenges and breastfeeding, right? I had a hungry baby for six months in my first go round and that gave me postpartum anxiety and postpartum depression like nothing else will, if no one sleeps for months on end, right?
And what really struck me about your experiences and how you write about this is that, the of woman born reference that you make from what 1976, talks about the institution of motherhood making it feel like mothers are just a natural, instinctual, born with it characteristic, as opposed to a set of caregiving skills that can and frankly must be learned and sometimes are hard earned, right? And it makes you feel like if you're struggling in early motherhood, not only to care for yourself, but to care for your new, very vulnerable infant, like you're not a natural born mother and somehow that's a personal failing, right? And so that experience, to have the name matrescence or the sort of description of matrescence as this adolescent type period of learning how to be a new kind of person, I think is such a reframe as opposed to this institution of motherhood that makes it feel like if you're not naturally inclined towards it, you can't cut it.
LUCY: That's such a good point. You put that so well. The idea that actually it's a period of learning and there's no definition of how long matrescence lasts for. Like, I would actually say that mine, I think has lasted for about seven years in terms of kind of, you know, learning, settling, grounding, becoming kind of a, as much as I could be a kind of complete new person.
EMILIE: Yeah. Which is part of it, right? It's like you will not be the same person after this.
LUCY: Yeah. And who knew? I mean,...
EMILIE: Who knew that? I know.
LUCY: …I think that the, um. Let me just say, firstly, I'm sorry that you had a tough time and what you said about sleep really resonates. I think we expect new mothers to basically not sleep at all for many months, and that we just don't connect that with the maternal mental health crisis, as if we're machines. But I think the Adrienne Rich's, amazing gift to us of this, she distinguished between the institution of motherhood and the experience of motherhood. And I found that super helpful because by saying the institution of motherhood, she was talking about the kind of systems and structures of society around motherhood.
So, you know, it's a political experience becoming a mother, even though we, like, pretend to ourselves it's private, you know, political decision about childcare, political decision about, you know, paid leave, all these things are political. But I found it very helpful, this idea of being able to kind of separate the institution from the experience in a way that allowed me to critique and analyze the situation. Because, you know, for a long time I thought if I say anything negative about being a mom, people are just going to think I don't love my kid.
And, you know, that's still, I think, quite an oppressive pressure, you know, of the patriarchal motherhood vibe that people, which is kind of suppressing, like, potential power and revolution and change. And you know, so that gives us a way of saying the institution. Thinking about, like I've seen in so much of your brilliant work, you know, the mixture of individual and collective. You know, obviously, I will end on this, I know I'm rambling, but matrescence is a very individual experience. Of course, like, so women of color, women of socioeconomic disadvantage, neurodiverse women, queer women, lots, you know, people will have different vulnerabilities, risks, social factors that will make it more of a vulnerable situation. But it's also a very collective, social, ecological experience.
EMILIE: Totally. And you're not rambling at all, for what it's worth, because that is the water we swim in here. And honestly. So we're recording this in September, early September. It's not coming out until mid February. But, I've been struck here in the States at how much our election, our presidential election, is centering on mothers and parents right now. Who saw that coming? It's like, you know, whether we're talking about single, what is it? “Childless cat ladies”, J.D. vance's infamous quote, or we're talking about the cost of childcare, exponentially rising in this country. Reproductive freedoms being stripped away from women in the past decade here, not even like four years here. So it's just. It's really kind of shocking to me how much motherhood is taking center stage in this presidential election. I have no idea how it's gonna turn out by the time this episode airs, but knocking on all the wood that it turns out.
LUCY: Me too. That's such a good point. I think it's interesting also to see this kind of widespread, like, panic about birth rate and, you know, the kind of demonization of childless, you know, cat ladies, whatever. And it's like, well, you know, a declining birth rate is, is partly there because, you know, neoliberal, individualistic societies such as yours and mine have created a very hostile society in which to raise children. And it's not like, you know, when we are social beings, we need people. And, you know, I hope that this kind of myth and idea that, you know, women can just, you know, have the babies and be at home and it's natural and basically, you know, prop up the economy by producing the workers without complaint is coming to an end. Because, you know, we're people too, and we need to be in positions of power as well.
EMILIE: You wrote so brilliantly here early on in your book. I would soon learn that caregiving was much, much harder, more confronting, exciting, creative, beautiful, stressful, alarming, rewarding, tedious, transformative, enlivening and occasionally deadening than I imagined. And much more essential to a working society than we give it credit for. And I think that sums it up, right? It's both this bamboozling that you kind of described that we've been sold this natural, beautiful, calm, warm, and fuzzy image of what motherhood looks like. And in fact, it's a really challenging and beautiful but absolutely fundamental part of how we prop up society. And we're expected to do so with, no, with little support, right? From that society that relies on mothers.
LUCY: Absolutely. And I think, you know, it's so connected with this idea of the scare, quote, kind of natural mother. Like the naturalization of the mother. And, you know, this idea that it's like, you know, this old idea that it's kind of like women's ultimate fulfillment and purpose is a way of, you know, not providing proper social support and social care and make, trying to make it as private as possible, you know, which, which doesn't help, which doesn't help anyone.
EMILIE: No, absolutely. If it's a personal problem, then you have to figure it out on your own, right? In that sort of neoliberal, individualist way. So somewhere in between. It's somewhere in between, isn't it? Because everyone's experience is different. But that doesn't mean it should be private, ignored by public policy, right?
LUCY: Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, I feel like new mothers today are kind of being asked to do something quite impossible, which is to, you know, work like we don't have kids, and raise kids like we don't work. And I don't think that's a coincidence. You know, I think there's a kind of. Andrea O'Reilly, the amazing feminist academic, kind of said something along the lines of, at the time, women were winning, you know, their rights in the workplace. Suddenly these maternal ideals come in, which are very oppressive, you know, this kind of intensive motherhood idea. And I think that the more we can talk about it more we can share about it, more we can kind of bust some of the myths and some of the taboos, and the easier it is to kind of realize that people are feeling the same way, and to organize and to support each other and, you know, to fight.
Because there is so much grotesque, like, inequality around matrescence. Like, if you like, matrescence, I think is a really good, like, avenue to look at how society's going wrong. So, for example, in the UK, black women are four times more likely to die in childbirth, in the perinatal period. And I think it's similar in the US and that's just. I mean, there's no words for that. Like, such a shame on our society, a stain on our society that that's the case. So, you know, I think there is a lot of social power in thinking about this transition and looking at it and kind of bringing it out from under the carpet or out of the nursery.
EMILIE: Yeah, absolutely. And part of how we do that is sort of like, bridging the world of science and public policy, right? Cause we've been talking quite a bit about how we need systemic acknowledgement of this period. But you also get into the science of just how significant a transformation this is. And I think I related to feeling in my brain like things were changing.
Even at times within the first year of my son's life, I did feel like a rebellious teenager who was, like, grasping at something that made me feel like my individual self again, like, kind of acting out and, like, not regulating very well. My poor husband can tell you more about that, but it's like, I just remember feeling really unhinged in a way, and you kind of get into the fact that our brains are going through massive change during this time in ways that I recall learning about adolescence, but not matrescence. So, what did you uncover in that scientific inquiry?
LUCY: Yeah, so this really blew my mind. And um, yeah, similar to you, I felt quite unhinged and I did some quite unhinged things.
EMILIE: [LAUGHTER] Yeah.
LUCY: And felt just very like my brain was a different brain to what it had been before. You know, I was very preoccupied by the baby. Hyper vigilant, highly anxious. But also it just felt different and I couldn't really explain it. I had, no one had ever said your brain's change like no one had said anything like you give birth but actually there are changes that remain. And I was so fortunate that the year my first child was born, 2016, was the year when this landmark groundbreaking study was published by Elseline Hoekzema and her team of neuroscientists. And for the first time they found that pregnancy renders significant and pronounced changes in the human brain. And lots of scientists have built on that work since finding like, incredible things like, um, the changes in pregnancy and early motherhood to the brain are as seismic and dramatic as those in adolescence.
You know, like we said before, like everyone knows what it feels like to be an adolescent. It's such a weird long period of adjustment. But, that's what's happening to women who, and birthing people who are becoming mothers. I mean it's bananas how big it is and how small it is presented as. So we also know in terms of the brain science, I just give you a little whistle top tour, obviously there's more about it in my book.
So presumably the brain is changing in order for the mother to care for the infant. And there's also, I found this so interesting, there are areas of the brain, of all sorts of areas of the brain that change, including the default mode network. And one researcher put it as these changes alter the neural basis of the self. And I think that really speaks to this kind of like sense that yourself has changed, your identity. You know a lot of women talk to me and I resonate with this, this kind of sense of disintegration or of dissolving, like who am I? Like do I even exist? Like what am I, kind of thing.
And the other really interesting aspect of this, this work is that it isn't just pregnant women whose brains change. We know that the father brain changes and non-birthing mothers. So with hands-on affectionate care of the baby, the baby is eliciting changes in the brain. We're all born with the neural circuitry to give care, we evolved in collective caregiving networks. It makes sense that we can all give care. It's not just a thing that, you know, women and mothers can do, obviously. And now we know that fathers’ brains anatomically change as well.
I'll end on this. This does mean though that with this kind of unparalleled plasticity of the brain, there is, as we know about in adolescence, a vulnerability. So when the brain is changing so much and it's really plastic, it can be vulnerable to severe stress. So social factors such as poverty, systemic racism, domestic violence, or a child with a significant health problem, birth trauma, all, there's lots of different factors which can make this a much more precarious time. So I think the brain, the brain science is fascinating. I'm sure they'll, you know, they're adding to it all the time, but essentially it underlines, I think, and illuminates, or kind of cements this notion that, you know, we're talking about that so many mothers know that it is a big change and that your brain is literally changing shape. And that's going to maybe take a little while to kind of get used to.
EMILIE: Right. And it runs contrary to, I think, how the modern feminist movement has made us believe like, we can do it all in the same way that men do it, right? And I'm so glad that you're acknowledging how men and feminists, fathers have their own patrescence journey and their own brain changes, because it's really not all on moms, but we're also going through something that is not akin to just, you know, having a flower grow out of a flower pot, right? It's so much more significant that it, you know, it makes sense if you are not yourself after this experience.
LUCY: Absolutely. And I think you bring in such an important point and you know, thank goodness for the feminists over decades and centuries for, you know, winning us various rights. But I think in the kind of late 20th century there was a sense of kind of motherhood being seen as what was holding women back and so, needing to kind of push it under the carpet, pretend it doesn't really happen…
EMILIE: Delay it.
LUCY: …Yeah, delay it. Be like men in order to survive in the kind of economy that we live in. And now I think we maybe feel, you know, safe enough, and I say that, you know, I'm conscious of my own privilege, you know, as a white woman and middle class woman in the UK, to say actually becoming a mother is also like a big, meaningful, seismic thing. Like, I'm sure we can have both things. Like we can have the work that we women need to do, uh, and society needs women to do as well as, you know, caring at this vulnerable time and supporting new mothers.
EMILIE: Absolutely. And I'm so glad to see that becoming the sort of next frontier for feminists, both on a personal and, and public policy standpoint. You can also kind of see it fracturing us as women online with the rise of the trad wife hashtag. And, you know, it feels like another mommy war is upon us when I'm like, I totally believe there's such a wide spectrum of experiences for women who are child free by choice, right. All the way to women who opt out of the paid workforce to become moms. Like, we need a feminist movement that welcomes and acknowledges all of that diversity, right?
LUCY: Absolutely. And choice giving, giving everyone a choice, including men and fathers, you know, giving a lot like, you know, opening it up properly so that men actually can take part in the challenges and toils and rewards of caregiving.
EMILIE: Yeah, absolutely. And that without losing their job and career along the way, [LAUGHTER] if they want it, you know, wow, we could talk for hours about this. And there's so much more to your book Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood, which was just released here in the States back in May. Congratulations again on this triumph. What would you want to leave listeners knowing about what you hope to accomplish with this book? What do you hope women, caregivers, parents of all kinds who read this, walk away with knowing?
LUCY: I think that since publishing this book, I've been really struck by, and I've been written to by many hundreds of women now. Been really struck by a sense of women feeling like they have to do it alone, you know, or that they're alone in their kind of what they see as a failing, like in some way that they're failing to be this kind of perfect, natural mother and work and etc., etc., and then there's shame and there's stigma and that creates barriers and obstacles.
So I suppose with this book I'm, you know, it's so gratifying to me to feel like I'm connecting with women and then allowing women to talk to other women and men and you know, everybody. Because I think, you know, while the revolution, a revolution might take a while, shame and stigma can be eroded quite easily with a conversation or with the like, you know, how's your matrescence? Or, you know, how can I care for you? Or something like that. So I suppose, I guess, it's an aim of connecting people and making people not feel alone or alienated.
EMILIE: Amazing. Well, I think we have accomplished part of that mission, hopefully today. And, Lucy, I want to just thank you so much for this, this triumphant work, but also just bringing your full self to this conversation. And it is such an overdue topic that I've been meaning to tackle here on the podcast and I'm so excited to have had this opportunity to connect with you. Where can my listeners learn more about you and keep up with all the great work you're doing?
LUCY: I'm kind of sporadically on Instagram @lucyfjones. I have a website. I don't really do X, but Instagram, really, and yeah, let me just say that thank you so much for having me, and I'm such an admirer of your work, and what you have created, and the work that you do. And I'm also wishing you so well for your new arrival and your second matrescence.
EMILIE: Yeah, I was gonna ask you that, selfishly. Let me squeeze in one last question here, actually. You're a mom of three, right? And you've been a mom for a while now. What should I expect for round two? What do you, I mean, how was matrescence for you, round two?
LUCY: So I think that the first, like, there's nothing like the first matrescence. So that is like the most intense, you know, like, bigger shock. But I think that I have had kind of a different matrescence with each one. You know, it's different going from 1 to 2. And also it kind of depends on the child. And every child is different. They're temperament. Temperament might bring up, you know, we haven't even talked about, like, you know, what can it could bring up in you? You know, like, having children could bring up all the stuff from the past, et cetera. I think there it's such a complex and wild thing to bring a new person into the world. But I would say, yeah, there's nothing like the first that, you know, you know, you got this.
EMILIE: Thank you. I'm glad to hear that. That's sort of my interpretation, having seen many of my peers go through round two at this point and been like, you know, there's a debate, is it harder to go from 0 to 1, or 1 to 2? And I can understand both sides of that. But the absolute shell shock of your entire identity shifting, it's just not something I was prepared for round one and feel much more prepared for this time around. So, I'm glad to hear that. Well, thank you so much for indulging me, Lucy. It's been such a pleasure.
LUCY: It was lovely to speak to you. Thank you for having me, Emilie.
EMILIE: For more links to everything that Lucy and I just talked about, head to bossedup.org/episode494 that's bossedup.org/episode494. And now I want to hear from you. What did you make of today's conversation? Have you experienced your own matrescence? If so, what resonated with you or what was different for you than what we described here today? If you're a mom to be or someone who's thinking about becoming a parent someday, what did you make of this conversation?
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I would love to, as always, keep the conversation going in the Bossed Up Courage Community on Facebook and in the Bossed Up LinkedIn Group. And until next time, let's keep bossin’ in pursuit of our purpose, and together let's lift as we climb.
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