The best book I've ever read about motherhood' Jude Rogers, Observer'I kept scribbling in the 'We need to know this stuff!

Matrescence: Why Discussing The Transition To Motherhood Matrescence: Why Discussing The Transition To Motherhood

Many women have been told the village is to help raise the child in the form of babysitting and childcare.

By exploring matrescence – the physical, physiological and psychological process of becoming a mother – within this wider context of the natural world, Jones recalibrates ideas of how women are meant to exist and behave during these fast-changing years. Experiencing the reality: Before the birth, mothers often imagine the baby according to their culture, their personal history, and their own childhood. Matrescence holds the power to carry us back to ourselves, to the rituals and community from which we came; the caregivers we all hold the seed within us to become- and Lucy Jones is the person who should have written it.

Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth

As it deepens our understanding of matrescence, it raises vital questions about motherhood and femininity; interdependence and individual identity; as well as about our relationships with each other and the living world.Some animals exhibit remarkable cooperation: female vampire bats have been observed to care for orphaned young as their own, while gorillas look after orphaned infants as a group. Matrescence holds the power to carry us back to ourselves, to the rituals and community from which we came. In 2010, I launched my course dedicated to matrescenceand the developmental perspective on motherhood.

Matrescence - Amy Taylor-Kabbaz What is Matrescence - Amy Taylor-Kabbaz

another new mother asked me at that time, although her eyes were as dark-rimmed as mine, and more than six years later I can still feel the searing, silencing shame. Moving from the early stages of her pregnancy to her eldest child’s first day at school, she describes how the mother’s brain literally changes shape’.The term “matrescence,” coined by anthropologist Dana Raphael in the mid-’70s and brought into common use in psychology by clinical psychologist Aurelie Athan, head of the maternal psychology lab at Columbia University, describes a woman’s transition into parenthood.