Matrescence by Lucy Jones review – the birth of a mother

Motherhood changes a person. We all know this. Yet in so-called Weird countries (western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic) there is very little in the way of ritual to acknowledge this rite of passage, this fundamental transformation. How can this be, Lucy Jones asks, when it is “a transition that involves a whole spectrum of emotional and existential ruptures”?

Unlike adolescence, “matrescence” is scarcely marked. Instead, we are expected to get on with it, sublimate all our needs to our new baby, and weather this most fundamental of human shifts without making too much of a fuss. We don’t properly recognise “the psychological and physiological significance of becoming a mother: how it affects the brain, the endocrine system, cognition, immunity, the psyche, the microbiome, the sense of self”.

Jones’s book is an attempt to correct this. Billed as a radical new examination of how motherhood changes the mind and body, it’s a work that I’d expected would fit neatly into what publishers and booksellers call the “smart thinking” category of nonfiction. What I found instead was a boundary-pushing book that is altogether tricksier, more complex and creative, transcending even the “part-memoir, part-critical analysis” genre that has become such a commonplace format for female authors in recent years.

Jones is known primarily as a science and nature writer (her first book was about foxes and her most recent, Losing Eden, looked at the human need for wild spaces) and I’ll confess I sighed slightly when I waded through an opening section about slime mould, though no doubt this will reassure readers of her other work that Matrescence is not a complete departure. Subsequent chapters begin with similar passages, which, Jones writes, attempt to show that natural change is not always beautiful. Initially I felt they jarred with the body of the work, which follows Jones’s journey into motherhood and is divided according to a series of themes, including birth, the brain, sleep and society.

But as the book went on I found I enjoyed reading about vampire bats and aurora borealis and spiders that eat their own mothers, and found her desire to place matrescence within the context of a wider ecology, and her emphasis on “the psychic and corporeal reality of our interdependence and interconnectedness with other species”, admirable. I also respect her absolute refusal to pander to the “enjoy every minute” brigade. As she writes in the introduction, “my children (she has three, all born close together) have brought me joy, contentment, fulfilment, wonder, and delight in staggering abundance. But that’s just part of the story. This is the rest.”

There is a trap for any critic reviewing books about motherhood who is also a mother: the trap of “this is not how it was for me”. It’s one I almost fell into, at times, as Jones laid out her experience of the “major, traumatic life crisis” that saw her confronted with her own “fundamental lack of control”, battling with feelings of guilt and “internal badness”, and experiencing “the loneliest time of my adult life” (38% of new mothers spend more than eight hours alone each day). The cultural myths of motherhood hold strong, and at times I found myself craving more delight, particularly because Jones’s writing on this aspect of motherhood is some of the most beautiful and creative in the book. Describing how it has enabled her to re-experience the past, she conjures “the scrape of armbands removed from an arm, the lemon-pine smell of hedgerow leaves and shrubs at adult-knee height, the dried-out film of a dead snail … the warm smell of swimming pools, the scent of my mother’s navy mohair cardigan”. She is great, too, on the work of motherhood: a passage in which she details the subtle but significant labours of the morning routine feels almost modernist. I hope one day she writes a novel.

That is not this book, though, and even for mothers who found matrescence a smoother experience, there is much to be gleaned as Jones skilfully elucidates the monumental shifts it brings, from the foetal cells that remain in a mother’s body for decades to evidence that pregnancy and birth has a dramatic, long-term impact on the brain that may even be permanent. Indeed, the chapter on the maternal brain is especially fascinating and, more importantly, validating for those of us who feel society’s minimising of matrescence flies in the face of our experience of it. This feeling is neatly summarised by Jones when she writes: “The closest I had ever been to death, to birth, to growth, to the co-conscious, to rapture, to rupture – was, according to the world around me, boring.” To read these words feels affirming, even radicalising. I find myself inwardly cheering at one point when another mother describes how “insipid/idealistic portrayals of motherhood made me less interested in it as a young person. I thought it was boring when it’s one of the most extreme socio-political experiences I have ever been through.”

The politics of motherhood is a bubbling source of despair and fury that underpins this book. Like many women, Jones describes feeling “hoodwinked” by norms of motherhood, how amid the pain, trauma and guilt of being unable to breastfeed she began to detect a coercive force. “Faintly, I smelt smoke,” she writes. Feminism owes a great debt to the women who smell smoke, and societal assumptions about unmedicated birth, breastfeeding, and intensive mothering continue to harm women’s mental and physical health daily. You may well find yourself raging at the various health professionals depicted: the midwife who cries at one woman’s bedside because she so wanted her to breastfeed, the health visitor who tells Jones “baby needs mummy” when she has the temerity to ask if she can let the baby cry for 30 seconds before picking her up, to see if she self-settles. Yet there are glorious, moving glimpses of maternal solidarity here too: the woman who picks a book off the floor of a train and reads it to Jones’s screaming daughter, the older woman at the garden centre who kneels down to tie Jones’s shoes because her hands are full with babies.

If at times there is an uneasy tension in this book between the science, memoir, social commentary and flashes of creative writing, this is a testament to its ambition. Jones never becomes bogged down in the material, which is quite an achievement considering its scope. At times I even wanted more. Jones hints at her “conservative (childhood) home”, and I found myself wondering how our own mothers shape our experience of matrescence. But to go there is to ask a lot of a writer, and I don’t blame her for not doing so. Jones is a pioneer, and as such has left some ground unexplored. This book is a beginning, and a fine one at that.

• Matrescence by Lucy Jones is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.