Essay: Mother, Interrupted

Why we need a new story about motherhood and the self.

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Mother and Child, by Christian Krohg

Lucy Jones’s Matrescence came out in the US almost exactly a year ago. I read it last summer - too late to write about it when the press cycle was still hot, but not too late, I hope, to reflect on it now. Mother’s Day feels like a good moment to return to a book that has become a kind of touchstone in the motherhood conversation. A book that insists that motherhood changes everything.

Reading Matrescence, I was gripped with the desire to board a plane to the other side of the world and move into the home of a friend who was a few weeks out from giving birth. “No one should be alone in a time like this,” I told her. (She gracefully declined.)

Matrescence captures the psychological textures of early motherhood with rare intensity, and there were pages where I wanted to underline every sentence. But though I was struck by the power of Jones’s writing, I never found myself persuaded by her central argument. Not because I disbelieve the science, but because I don’t think it proves what she thinks it does. And that matters, because when we treat the unravelling of maternal identity as a biological inevitability, we stop ourselves from imagining what might be necessary to make it otherwise.

Jones’s experience of early motherhood was profoundly unmooring. She writes of feeling like she had been “shipwrecked,” turned inside out by the intensity of birth and its aftermath. She describes walking down a familiar street and feeling like she was on another planet, her body on high alert, scanning constantly for danger. She feels tethered to her baby by invisible wires, unable to be fully present anywhere else. She feels guilty for working - uneasy being apart from her child - cut off from her friends, and out of place in a world not built for mothers. “I didn’t know who I was anymore,” she writes. “I felt increasingly insecure, psychically disintegrated.”

Central to Matrescence is a 2017 study published in Nature Neuroscience, which found that pregnancy produces long-lasting changes to the human brain - specifically, in areas related to social cognition and attunement to others. The study showed that women who had recently given birth displayed reductions in gray matter across several brain regions, including the frontal and temporal cortices and the midline. Jones emphasizes that these changes aren’t signs of damage, but signs of efficiency: a fine-tuning of the brain to better respond to a baby’s needs. They were so consistent that researchers could identify whether or not a woman had been pregnant just by looking at her brain scans.

When Jones discovers this data, she is in awe. This is the thing that will explain her experience, she thinks. “The hunch that I had become, was becoming, a different creature wasn’t in my imagination,” she writes. “The data anchored me. This was the metamorphosis of matrescence.”

But are these neurological changes really enough to explain the rupture she describes? Or are they simply one part of a bigger, more social story?

Jones’s experience of early motherhood is unfortunately common. But that doesn’t mean biology is the only explanation - or the most revealing one.

“The sense of upheaval Jones describes is a product of how we do motherhood - not just what happens to the maternal brain.”

What might have happened, for example, if instead of Jones’s husband leaving for work early in the morning while she remained home alone with their baby, they had shared the care equally from the very beginning? What if she hadn’t been so sleep-deprived? What if she had grown up in a culture that didn’t teach girls from childhood that a “good mother” is one who gives herself over entirely to her children?

Just as the questions Jones raises are deeply personal to her, so too are mine. Questions about identity, autonomy, and what we expect of mothers have shaped my own experience of motherhood - and they’re at the heart of the book I’m writing, which asks whether becoming a mother really needs to erase the woman at its center.

Jones acknowledges that maternal mental health might improve if mothers had more support. But she doesn’t push further into the larger questions of how motherhood is structured: What if men took parental leave alongside women, not just as a gesture but as a norm? What if we built a world where caring for children was treated not as an individual burden, but as a collective responsibility? What if our culture didn’t equate good motherhood with self-erasure?

Even if we succeeded in changing the structures of support around motherhood, the transition to parenthood would still be hard. New parents would still be sleep-deprived. Breastfeeding would still be painful at first. Some women would still experience postpartum anxiety or depression, wrought by hormones or by the existential weight of keeping a tiny, vulnerable person alive. But would we still experience the same identity-level rupture if mothers were granted the same permission to continue on with their lives that fathers are afforded?

“would we still experience the same identity-level rupture if mothers were granted the same permission to continue on with their lives that fathers are afforded?”

While Jones acknowledges the role of social forces, it is biology that she is most enthralled by. The science gives her experience weight and legitimacy, and I understand why. When your sense of self has come undone, you want something to tether it to. You want to believe it means something. And biology feels solid in a way that social theory often doesn’t.

But as Cordelia Fine argues in Delusions of Gender, biology is often used to reinforce gendered expectations under the guise of objectivity. This is how we end up with stories about men being “wired” to seek youth, or women being “wired” for childcare. These narratives rarely reflect the complexity of the science, and they often become self-fulfilling. We expect something to be so, and so we interpret our experience through that lens.

The same could be said of Matrescence. I don’t doubt that pregnancy and postpartum produce neurological changes. But the leap that these changes transform women into “new hybrid creatures” feels less like science than myth.

And myth, especially when cloaked in data, is powerful. It shapes what mothers expect of themselves. It tells a story of motherhood in which obliteration is the price of entry. And that, I think, is too high a cost.

At a prose level, Matrescence is electrifying. Jones evokes the sensory and psychological textures of early motherhood with startling clarity. She is also a creative and original thinker, veering beyond the usual narratives that dominate contemporary motherhood books in ways that extend beyond her central biological argument.

For all these reasons and more, Matrescence will likely become a classic that transcends the moment in which it was published, like Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work or Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born. As a granular depiction of early motherhood, I’m not sure I’ve ever read anything I found more vivid or compelling.

“what looks like biology is often just how we’ve chosen to structure care”

And yet, if I had read it before becoming a mother, I think it would have made me less likely to have a child. Not because of its depictions of birth, or breastfeeding, or isolation, but because in those years when I was still undecided, nothing scared me more than the possibility that motherhood would erase me. That I’d no longer recognize myself or my life. If I had believed that having a child would irrevocably change me at the cellular level, I wouldn’t have done it. And that would have been a mistake, I think - both because that change never came to pass, and because I rather like my son.

About two-thirds of the way through Matrescence, Jones tells a story about trying to go for a swim in the sea. Her infant daughter is on the shore with her father. Jones dives into the water. Coming up for air, she hears her daughter crying. She bargains with herself: “A swim is good for me. I need a swim. It will make me a better mother today.” Then: “Are people looking at me and wondering where is her mother and why is she still in the sea and not running to her?” And finally: “for fuck’s sake,” as she makes her way back to the shore.

“Not every mother feels erased. And often, the difference is scaffolding, not wiring.”

Later, she writes that she debated whether or not to include that line in the book. Would the reader think she didn’t love her daughter enough?

Similarly, I fear that you will think me a bad mother when I tell you that I never felt guilty leaving my son with his father - even when he was only a few weeks old - whether it was to meet a friend for coffee, to attend a rehearsal for the play I was producing, to take a yoga class, or to go on a short work trip. I never felt conflicted about continuing to work, because I never believed that my proper place was with him and him only. I don’t think this means I loved him any less - and no one would suggest as much of a father who went on a work trip.

Is it that my brain didn’t undergo the same transformation Jones’s did? That I wasn’t flooded with the right hormones during pregnancy, or that my gray matter didn’t shrink in the correct places? Perhaps. But what seems more likely is that the difference in my experience stems from the different level of support I had. That although my marriage is still far from perfectly equal (I wrote the first draft of this essay sitting next to my son on a plane while my husband sat alone a few rows away), I wasn’t the one doing every night wake. That neither I nor my husband found it strange for me to leave the house and take time for myself, just as he did. That although I was my son’s primary caregiver, I both had the means to and didn’t feel conflicted about paying for care so I could continue to work.

Many of the day-to-day facets of my life changed. But the woman I was inside remained remarkably consistent.

I worry too that you will think I’m a bad mother because I said that I “rather like” my son earlier. Obviously, that was an understatement. Obviously, I mean I love him more than anyone else I have ever met.

This isn’t to say that motherhood leaves us entirely unchanged. In When You Care, which I also read last summer,

Elissa Strauss

describes going into parenthood determined not to lose herself, only to discover that caregiving did, in fact, change her. But not in the way she’d feared. “I had put so much energy into figuring out how not to lose myself to caregiving,” she writes, “that I completely ignored the possibility that I might, in fact, find some of myself there.”

Like Jones, Strauss argues that care rewires us - but as an expansion, not an erasure. What struck me most in her account was that she doesn’t treat this transformation as uniquely maternal, or even gendered. The rewiring she describes doesn’t come from biology, but from the act of caring itself: from presence, repetition, connection, and responsibility. That, more than any hormonal shift, aligns with how the attachment built between me and my son in the weeks and months after he was born. Our bond didn’t form simply because I was his mother. It formed through daily acts of care.

Multiple times in Matrescence, Jones likens the transition to motherhood to adolescence: a period of hormonal, emotional, and neurological flux. The comparison is a useful one. Like adolescence, matrescence is a time of transformation. But few people would say they became a fundamentally different person after adolescence. More often, we think of it as an evolution. A period of disorientation, yes, but not obliteration.

Ultimately, we are all changing all the time. “You are not the same person from one moment to the next,” Jones writes, quoting an article in New Scientist. And she’s right. But if that’s true, then motherhood is not the only transformation that matters. Nor is it necessarily the most profound.

Matrescence as a concept - a name for the psychological and physiological shift into motherhood - is valuable. But Matrescence, the book, frames that transition as a near-total biological transformation. And that framing, I fear, becomes a trap. The book gives voice to real feelings, but frames them as unchangeable facts. And that framing, I fear, makes it harder to imagine other possibilities.

“Maternal dislocation is real. But it isn’t destiny.”

The sense of upheaval Jones describes is a product of how we do motherhood - how we structure it, support it, narrate it - as much as it is of anything that happens to the maternal brain.

And if we want to make that experience less shattering, we need to stop pretending it’s inevitable.

Until next time,

Rachel