A science writer charts the monumental impact of having children from every angle
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”.
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