Soon after my first child was born, I became unexpectedly obsessed with Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. It was the only story that I could find myself in. Yes, that’s right, the tale about the salesman who awakes one morning to find himself turned into a gigantic insect.
Stay with me. There are actually a lot of similarities between Gregor Samsa’s situation and the postnatal period. Samsa’s body has completely changed (his ‘domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments’; mine was unrecognisable after pregnancy and childbirth). He is isolated in his room, away from society, to work out what is going on. And Samsa struggles to adapt for some time: ‘What has happened to me?’
Yes, it’s also different: I had my wonderful baby I had always dreamed of — and that was a choice. But I also felt extremely weird. For quite a while. Beforehand, I thought I would be the same person after my daughter was born. I thought my body was like a pot in which she would grow and I would care for her for nine months and then go back to work — and me — as normal. Ha! How naive I was, and how misled, by faulty social ideas about care, vulnerability and our interdependence.
I soon realised I was in the throes of a neglected, ignored and very real metamorphosis. The wildest metamorphosis of my life. My experience of early motherhood was not how it was depicted in culture — pink-hued, calm, blissed-out. Yes, there was bliss, but it was also gnarly, trippy, dislocating and sometimes frightening.
It made more sense when I learnt about the new and growing science of parenthood. Neuroscientists have shown, for the first time, that pregnancy, childbirth and hands-on caregiving renders strong, pronounced changes on the brain. I felt like a different person because I was a different person. My brain was now literally a different brain.
The impact of pregnancy on the brain is as significant as the impact of adolescence
Neuroscientist Susanna Carmona and her lab in Madrid found that the impact of pregnancy on the brain is as significant as the impact of adolescence. This was mind-blowing to me, and explained, partly, how I was feeling so strange. But everyone knows teenagers go through awkward times. In adolescence, we bonded and reinforced who we were becoming through music and booze and phone calls and outfits and songs and poetry. It wasn’t easy, but it was expected, and we were together. In this metamorphosis — until I felt able to talk about it without being judged a ‘bad mother’ — I felt alone.
After Kafka, and spending a lot of time thinking about what happens inside a chrysalis, a major sanity-saver was discovering the word and concept of ‘matrescence’. It means the ‘time of mother-becoming’ and describes the physical, emotional, mental, existential and social metamorphosis that women and birthing people experience.
The word matrescence gives us a way to think and talk about this extraordinary development stage which is also a highly vulnerable time. In the UK, it was previously thought that 10-15 per cent of women develop a mental health problem in pregnancy or the first year of new motherhood, but more recent figures suggest it could be as many as 20 per cent. Many new mothers report feeling low, anxious, depressed and burnt out. In our hyper-individualistic society, with inadequate healthcare, the childcare crisis, taboos left right and centre, and unprecedented expectations on mothers, is it any surprise?
The new knowledge and research about the maternal experience has important implications for healthcare, social support and structural change. It will also — I hope — help women feel less alone on the wild ride of early motherhood, be more able to talk about the full spectrum of its agonies and ecstasies, and know in advance that they might even feel like an enormous insect for a while. ‘Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood’, by Lucy Jones, is out now (£25; Allen Lane)
