WE ARE two mothers sitting on a bench in the middle of a wild cemetery — the Holy Ghost Cemetery, in Basingstoke. It was the town’s burial ground between the 13th and early 20th centuries. There is silence here: the kind of peace that feels a world away from the hubbub and daily life with the five young children that we have between us.
Towards the south-east corner of the cemetery lies the Quaker burial ground. At the other end are buried other Nonconformists, such as Baptists and Congregationalists, including Thomas Burberry, of the Burberry-clothing family.
I have come to meet Lucy Jones, the author of the new book Matrescence: On the metamorphosis of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood. She suggests meeting here, because this place — teeming with life and weighty with death — holds a special place in this mother’s heart.
Jones moved to the area during her first “matrescence” — the term coined by the anthropologist Dana Raphael in the 1970s to describe the psychological and physiological process of becoming a mother. “This is sacred space for me,” Jones says of the cemetery. After she moved from east London when her first child — she now has three — was just two weeks old, this natural beauty spot became a refuge.
Stuart Simpson for PenguinLucy Jones
“In those early weeks and months and years of what I now know to be a significant transition and developmental stage, I found this cemetery, and it became really important. I have spent many hours here, with my children sleeping in prams. I’ve become very attached to a few of the trees here. I’ve fed my babies under the beech tree in the middle in heatwaves; I’ve spent many hours playing under there and making fairy houses. This place holds so many memories.”
This is also the place where Jones finds the slime moulds that she writes about in Matrescence. This is Jones’s fourth book; the previous three have been about nature and the ecology, from foxes and sharing the natural world with your children to Losing Eden: Why our minds need the wild, about which she spoke at last year’s Greenbelt Festival.
Although Matrescence is about motherhood, it is not as much of a departure from her previous scientific endeavours as one might think. What marks it out from other recent books about motherhood is the way in which stories of metamorphosis found in the natural world weave their way through her descriptions of the process of becoming a mother. The slime moulds make an appearance in the book, as do tadpoles, eels, mycelium, sea squirts, and the moon.
Jones began researching why and how contact and connection with the rest of nature is imperative for our health and well-being after a mental-health crisis in her twenties, and recovering from addiction issues. When she was diagnosed with post-natal depression after the birth of her first child, she kept returning to the cemetery to test the hypothesis that the wild really could make a difference at times of existential, mental, and physiological crises.
JONES, who was raised in a conservative Evangelical home but would now describe herself as agnostic, believes that the rhythms and rituals of church tradition can provide an anchor for women who find themselves unexpectedly in the storms of new motherhood. During research for the book, her father — an Anglican priest — pointed her towards the Prayer Book and its service for the churching of women.
“Despite my complicated relationship with the Christian Church,” she writes, “this ritual — any ritual — sounds appealing: to have the ‘pain and peril’ of childbirth recognised and not erased or swept under the carpet; to have the momentous occasion of childbirth acknowledged; for a community to give thanks and join in relief that the dangers of birth and been endured; to not be forgotten after birth.”
For Jones, it feels as if culture today is beginning to recognise the need to mark matrescence. There are gift boxes that you can buy new mothers now, she says, and even new-mother blessings. But perhaps they lack a sense of the transcendent.
Jones’s story is a familiar one of many millennials who have been raised in the Church, leaving it as they go through adolescence, and yet finding Christianity’s sense of meaning able to provide some comfort at times of existential crisis — or at least an exploration of the questions.
Despite the Church’s failures, Jones and others who find themselves in similar places of post-Christian spirituality-but-not-religiosity, the Bible’s stories are hard to shake. “Christianity, and the language and the literature of the Bible influenced me by having the Bible read to me — and reading the Bible myself — every day for my entire childhood. There are deep-seated images and symbols and ideas from the Bible which surface.”
Sitting in the Holy Ghost Cemetery and talking with Jones about childbirth, I think about the way in which the meaning-making provided by Christian ideas might be at its most helpful during times of both birth and death: the rites of passage at our beginnings and our endings. It is in the labour room that the liminal space between the two feels at its thinnest: the expectation of new life, the possibility of death for both the mother and the child, the primal screams, and the familiar and yet terrifying smell of blood.
“It hadn’t crossed my mind before giving birth that, by bringing a life into the world, I would also be bringing about death,” Jones writes in Matrescence. But it was in this place that the once familiar biblical imagery returned. In the weeks after giving birth, she kept visualising “an enormous, thick, purple velvet curtain hung from ceiling to floor in a cavernous temple, ripped from top to bottom”. She realised that she was remembering the description of the veil in the temple as being torn in two after Jesus died.
“When giving birth,” she tells me, “I really felt the presence of death in the room. It was really hard, and it can be brutal, but it’s important to recognise we’ve come through it and we’re OK. There is a way of seeing or experiencing this almost holy moment of birth that can help us to wear down some of our delusions about our supremacy and control over nature.”
For her, this is again about recognising our interconnectivity with the earth — not set apart from it, but very much a part of it — in which processes such as matrescence literally change our physiological make-up. “We’re in the climate crisis partly because we think we’re invincible and able to control nature.”
THAT the realities of matrescence take one by surprise when one becomes a mother is because there is a silence about mothering and the corporeal reality of motherhood; saccharine and idealised notions are put forward instead. “I was influenced by a flattening of the maternal experience in our culture, and its pastel-hued representations.”
She felt the irony of knowing the importance of closeness to nature for human well-being. Yet, the way in which the idea of the “natural mother” and its associated movements insist on so-called natural childbirth and natural breastfeeding can make women feel as if they will never live up to it.
“I am natural, because I am nature, and because I am human and of the earth,” she says. “But my matrescence wasn’t calm, and it wasn’t peaceful. It wasn’t simple, and it wasn’t necessarily instinctive.”
Perhaps, for Jones, it felt both natural and unnatural. “Childbirth for me was brutal and hardcore and gnarly, and breastfeeding didn’t entirely work out for me.” This is the reality for many women who find themselves expecting one thing before they become mothers and feel disorientated by the challenges that come next.
Jones’s latest book joins part of a new wave of women who are speaking and writing about the realities and challenges of “the institution of motherhood” — a term coined by Adrienne Rich’s seminal 1976 book Of Woman Born. Recent books that describe the warts-and-all realities and criticise the systemic flattening of maternal experience include Don’t Forget to Scream by Marianne Levy, M(otherhood) by Pragya Agarwal, and Motherhood: A manifesto by Eliane Glaser.
These books join social-media movements such as “Mummy’s Gin Fund”, in which women are encouraged to share their experience, with “No mum left behind” and (supposedly) without judgement. The truth is that judgement of mothers will continue for a long time yet, so deeply engrained is the perfect-mother archetype in Anglo-American culture.
For Jones, what will help to free us is more diverse representation and releasing women from the insistence on “enjoying every moment”. “How is a woman supposed to enjoy every minute when she’s recovering from a third-degree tear after giving birth?” Jones asks. “Or when the baby’s been crying for four hours a day? To say ‘Enjoy every minute’ feels quite threatening and potentially like gaslighting. I thought that, because I wasn’t enjoying every moment, there was something wrong with me.”
For Jones, motherhood is transcendent and dull, domestic and awe-inspiring, creative and mundane. To voice these feelings of the ups and downs of matrescence is to puncture the pristine and one-dimensional image of the perfect mother, and open yourself up to judgement from others. “It can feel almost seditious to say anything about the maternal experience that isn’t blanket positivity.”
It feels like a moment for us to free mothers from these pressures, Jones believes. “We need consciousness-raising groups like in the ’70s, and more formal ways of getting women together to talk about what needs to change. We need to release ourselves from some of the shame and stigma around matrescence.”
Matrescence: On the metamorphosis of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood by Lucy Jones is published by Penguin Books at £25 (Church Times Bookshop £22.50); 978-0-241-51348-4.