One of the most discomposing things about the sense of individuality is the knowledge that although there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives, there is but one way to come alive — through the bloody, sweaty flesh of another; the knowledge that your own flesh is made of someone else’s cells and genes, the fact of you a fractal.

While mothering can take many forms and can be done by many different kinds of people, the process of one organism generating another from the raw materials of its own being — a process known as matrescence — is as invariable as breathing, as inevitable to life as death. In blurring the biological boundary between the creature imparted and the one doing the imparting, matrescence is the ultimate refutation of the self, the ultimate affirmation that individuality is an illusion — a cocoon of ego to keep us from apprehending the plurality we are. The science behind it is so intricate and so defiant of our commonsense intuitions about the possible that it seems to partake of the miraculous. Nested within it are questions of profound and sweeping implications, questions relevant and deliriously fascinating even to those of us without the psychological impulse or biological ability to bear children, questions that touch on some of the most elemental experiences of being human: change, vulnerability, reciprocity, resilience, belonging.

English journalist Lucy Jones takes up these questions in Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood (public library), braiding together her own experience of originating new life, some revelatory scientific studies that undermine our basic assumptions about personhood and our most unquestioned political priorities, and some astonishing counterpoints to the illusion of individuality in the nonhuman world, from the maternity colonies of vampire bats to a species of tiny marine larvae that digest their own tail, brain, and nerve cord to become an unrecognizably different adult organism.

Recalling how her first pregnancy gave her a taste of this simultaneous dissolution and exponentiation of the self — the substance of which, as Borges so memorably observed, is time — Jones considers the infinities nested in any one life:

Time started to bend. I was carrying the future inside me. I would learn that I was also carrying the eggs, already within my baby’s womb, that could go on to partly form my potential grandchildren. My future grandchildren were in some way inside me, just as part of me spent time in the womb of my grandmother. I was carrying inside me a pool of amniotic fluid, which was once rivers, lakes and rain. I was carrying a third more blood, which was once soil and stars and lichen.[2] The baby was formed of the atoms of the earth, of the past and the future. Every atom in her body existed when the earth formed 4.5 billion years ago. She will live for many years, I hope, when I have returned to the ground. She will live on the earth when I am gone. Time bends.

Time brings space along with it, bending the universe itself toward the cosmic nativity story that is a human being. Jones recounts the postpartum awakening to a reality larger than herself, larger than her new baby, encompassing everything that ever was and ever will be, consonant with the deepest meaning of love as the act of unselfing:

Back at home with our daughter, just one day old, I found that our flat felt different, as if I’d stepped through a portal into a parallel universe, or onto the set of a film.

In my arms, a collection of trillions of atoms that had cycled through generations of ancient supernova explosions.

We were both so old, made from stars born billions of years ago.

We were both so new, she, breathing, outside me; I being made again in matrescence.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. I couldn’t sleep for the beauty of her. Little pink mouth. Doughball cheeks. Plant-stalk soft bones. Her astral holiness.

Body of my body, flesh of my flesh.

I heard the contraction and expansion of the universe bouncing into existence, new galaxies, axons, dendrites; cells and love, cells and love.

This altered state is not merely a psychological experience — it is a profoundly physiological one. Jones cites a series of landmark studies of the cellular exchange between mother and baby via the placenta, which found that maternal cells, actual entire cells, remain in the child’s body throughout life, while fetal cells can dwell in the mother’s brain decades after giving birth. The medical geneticist and neonatologist Diana Bianchi, who spearheaded the research, termed this phenomenon microchimerism, after the chimera from Greek mythology — creatures composed of different parts from multiple animals. Microchimerism is possible because humans have one of the most invasive placentas among animals, colonizing one hundred uterine vessels and arteries with thirty-two miles of capillaries that would span the whole of London if laid out along the Thames — an enmeshment impossible to extract without a trace.

Because matrescence is such a system-wide neurobiological reconfiguration, impacting everything from metabolism to memory, research has found the pregnant brain to be as plastic as the adolescent — a time in which “dynamic structural and functional changes take place that accompany fundamental behavioural adaptations.”

These processes are so powerful that alter the neural basis of the self, so powerful that they reach beyond the biological boundaries of the mother and into the behavioral adaptations of anyone involved in post-birth childcare, which is also part of matrescence — fathers, grandparents, caretakers of any kind for whom the newborn becomes a primary focus of attention. Drawing on a body of research, Jones writes:

Caregiving neural circuitry exists in both male and female brains. Early neuroscientific research on humans is now showing that caregiver brains experience significant plasticity, even without the experience of pregnancy. Hands-on caring shapes brain circuitry and causes other biological changes. In 2020, a groundbreaking study showed that having a baby changes a father’s brain anatomy.

This caretaking is essential for our survival, as infant individuals and as an adolescent species, in a way that it is not for most other creatures, for out of it arise the hallmarks of our humanity. Unlike the newborn giraffe calf, who can rise to her feet and walk within hours of birth, or the newly hatched turtle, who can take to the woods or the waves immediately, human are born utterly helpless, to be fed and bathed and gurgled at, remaining dependent for years as the 400 grams of rosy flesh grow in their bone cave to become a three-pound miracle coruscating with one hundred trillion synapses, ablaze with the capacities for the guillotine and the Goldberg Variations.

Jones writes:

To be a smart species — to be able to learn and read and write and draw and solve and build and invent and empathize and imagine — humans have to be born vulnerable. Few other species of animal on earth are as helpless and immature as human babies. The brains of other primates are much more developed at birth. Humans are one of the only mammals with brains that grow so significantly outside the womb. The benefit of this early helplessness is that it means the brain can adapt and rewire as the infant grows.

Given how fundamental matrescence is to the flourishing of the human species and the human animal, to systemically deprioritize and marginalize pregnancy and motherhood, as our society does, seems like plain self-sabotage. With an eye to the disproportionate precedence of mental illness in new mothers and the consistent findings that social support is the single most effective means of inoculating them against it, Jones quotes those unforgettable lines by Gwendolyn Brooks — we are each other’s harvest / we are each other’s business / we are each other’s magnitude and bond — and writes:

Increasingly, social isolation and loneliness are recognized as risk factors for mental and physical health problems and early mortality. Loneliness is as damaging for health as smoking up to fifteen cigarettes a day. Although we know that it can increase during transitional periods of life — for example, during adolescence, illness, bereavement, retirement — researchers have only recently started studying loneliness in the perinatal period. In the last decade or so, the first work has been published recognizing that women experiencing loneliness in pregnancy and new motherhood are more likely to suffer from mental illness. Studies suggest that loneliness also exacerbates symptoms of depression in fathers. The findings suggest serious fault lines in our society. It is striking that we’ve so forgotten our interdependence that we need scientists to prove to us that we need other people to survive.

This is precisely why matrescence, in all its plasticity and its revelation of interdependence, in being “a crucible in which the dross can be burned off and the wilder, more authentic self remains,” can serve as a recalibration of our collective priorities far beyond the mother’s experience of motherhood. Jones writes:

Times of transformation, whatever they might be, are opportunities to find new connectedness; to choose and consolidate the things that matter; to bring repressed selves out of the shadows into the light; to forgive; to grow layers of nacre, of resilience, of acceptance.

Emanating from the book is a reminder of what we so readily forget and are so steadily conditioned to forget: that we don’t have to accept the choices handed down to us by our culture as givens. Noting that “a culture can choose what it diminishes and what it grow,” Jones envisions a different choice:

We have to see the structures we’ve inherited in order to tear them down. So many women believe their struggles with matrescence are the result of their own weakness and moral failing. This is a lie and it inhibits honest talk and social change. The difficulties of modern matrescence in neoliberal Western societies are structural and systematic. Seeing the oppressive nature of the institution of motherhood for what it is, and acknowledging the failure of society to support care work, allows us to think critically. Talking makes the structures of discrimination more visible. It allows us to identify what must change.

From pregnancy, women need health professionals who will give them full and accurate information without ideology or misinformation. We want the facts about birth and postnatal recovery, about breastfeeding, about what happens to the brain and our psychological lives. We need to improve maternal mental healthcare by introducing screening for issues in pregnancy and far more investment so mothers can get specialist treatment quickly. We need a meaningful focus on tackling systemic inequalities in maternal health outcomes. We need new birth rituals that acknowledge the gravity of childbirth without obscuring the reality and risks.

The government must urgently invest in midwives, mental health practitioners and wider postpartum care to fix the maternity crisis. Not investing in maternal health is a political decision.

These choices are the placenta permeating the body politic, its tendrils touching every aspect of life — not just the life of mother and baby, not even the life of the society in which they exist, but life itself as a planetary phenomenon. Bridging matrescence and ecology into what she terms matroecology, Jones writes:

The experience — one we have all had — of being part of another has much to teach us about our relations with the earth, the psychic and corporeal reality of our interdependence and interconnectedness with other species.

We have all experienced this becoming-within-another who is both known and unknown, an “otherness-in-proximity.”

[…]

What kind of world could we imagine and create if, instead of pretending we were thrown into existence, as though by magic, we truly considered our vulnerable, intimate, tactile, entangled, animal origins?

These are not merely political or philosophical questions — they are profoundly personal. (“The shortest statement of philosophy I have,” Audre Lorde wrote from the center of a politically invigorated life, “is my living, or the word ‘I.’”) Jones is not merely theorizing matroecology — walking home hand in hand with her small child, she is feeling it in the marrow of her being:

Seeds break through pods around us; buds break open with the leaves they have been holding folded, grown by the sunlight of the previous summer; green beads flecking the hedgerows break open; red beads in the maple trees above break open. The moon is up, and it pulls the ocean back and forth: a spring tide, the biggest tide, transforming the coasts of this island, breaking apart shell and stone, fish and bone. Beneath us, the trees are talking, making plans, breaking through soil and sediment. Above us, stars are being born and others are dying. We walk through the cemetery where organisms are being born and others are dying and creatures are being eaten and others are eating. The continent we are on is moving (at the speed of a fingernail growing), and the round rock we are on is moving (tilted on its axis, spinning). Farther below, plates are crushing and stretching, magma is cooling and heating and leaking, rock is forming and changing. The ebb and flow, the ebb and the glow. The lilting earth, and we lilting, too, in our one flicker of consciousness in this incessant motion. We sit underneath the canopy of a beech tree, a mother tree, and rake the earth, the soft brown soil, and the broken beech mast casings, and the hard brown seeds, and the chunks of soft white chalk made from the skeletons of ancient creatures from the sea, lit by a tender light, and we breathe.

Couple Matrescence with poet turned environmental historian and philosopher of science Melanie Challenger on how to be animal, then revisit Florida Scott Maxwell on the most important thing to remember about your mother and Lincoln Steffens’s playful, profound 1925 meditation on fatherhood.