Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood

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Did you know that if you have been pregnant and given birth, your brain will have changed shape in multiple areas? Changed actual shape?

Jones writes beautifully with searing honesty about life-changing physical and emotional impact of having a child.” —Rachel Sylvester, The Times (UK) Did you know, also, that in pregnancy, some hormones increase in levels by 200 or 300 or even 1,000 times? And that some hormones are unique to pregnancy? Me neither. Need deeper social change to help rather than anti depressants for postnatal depression )treating symptom not cause) I wanted to work out why many mothers around me were in crisis. I discovered the concept of ‘intensive mothering’, coined to describe the unprecedented cultural expectations heaped on mothers, ignorant to the role wider society has in bringing up a child. The demands on primary caregivers, most often mothers, to nurture children’s emotional health have never been higher, yet most mothers work and raise children without wider family support. It’s an impossible bind.A wild and beautiful book ... a book that will be passed among friends and will no doubt bring solace ... Reading this, I felt a jolt of recognition ... more than six years later I can still feel the searing, silencing shame. I wish someone could have handed me Matrescence -- Sophie McBain * New Statesman * A radical new examination of the transition into motherhood and how it affects the mind, brain and body. The new science of pregnancy and motherhood is showing us just how dramatic the hormonal fluctuations are, as well as how seismic the cardiac, immunological, haematological, renal and respiratory changes – and their lifelong impacts on the body. The experience of being part of another being has much to teach us about our fundamental interdependence

Beautifully written and signals a conspicuous new talent ... She traces the place of the fox in our culture over many centuries - Daily Telegraph A radical new examination of the transition into motherhood and how it affects the mind, brain and body At the time, I thought I must be imagining it. It is no surprise that I thought this: we knew virtually nothing about the maternal brain until the 2010s and our knowledge of the maternal experience is still staggeringly minimal.NHS pelvic health clinics – which provide treatment for the many who suffer childbirth-related injuries – will be available to all by 2024. Five years ago, 40 per cent of the country did not have access to maternal mental health services. Today there are specialist teams in all 44 local NHS areas in England, thanks to an injection of funding, and 33 maternal mental health clinics have opened, with more to come. In a landmark study published in Nature Neuroscience in 2017, researchers led by Elseline Hoekzema, a neuroscientist from the Netherlands, and Erika Barba-Müller, a neuroscientist working in Spain, provided evidence for the first time that pregnancy renders pronounced, consistent changes in brain structure. If you only read one book about what it means to become a mother, let it be this one. Sure, there are a million books out there about how to take care of a child (and most of them are contradicting each other, or shift gears every couple of years), but very few about what it means to become a mother, to go through matrescence. Did you know that the impact of pregnancy on the brain is comparable to that of adolescence? Neither did I.