Book review: Matrescence

A mixed bag of spot-on analysis and misplaced anger

I wanted to love Matrescence by Lucy Jones. I really did. I’d heard nothing but praise for it, in fact. And though parts of it were very insightful and well-written, particularly towards the beginning and end, the whole middle bit kind of ruined it for me. I’ll explain.

Part 1 - comprised of three chapters on the physical, emotional, and social transformation that comes with pregnancy - was astute, interesting, and filled with a compelling mixture of personal narrative, scientific research, and cultural commentary. The comparisons Jones made between the monumental changes of pregnancy and those of adolescence were apt, and I particularly liked her observation that “Unlike in societies where ceremonies mark the transition from one stage of life to another, the pregnant woman in this ‘interim period of strangeness’, as [Joan] Raphaell-Leff calls it, is made to feel profoundly alone.” If books could be beverages, it was exactly my cup of tea.

Soon it was time to move on to Part 2: Birth, the section I was anticipating most. By the time I put it down that evening and turned off the light, my view of the book had changed, and not for the better. It opens with these lines:

“Women are made to feel that they have failed if they haven’t achieved an intervention-free, analgesic-free birth. In fact, the failure lies with the decision not to give women all the facts, not to prepare them for the risks and the reality.”

It’s true that a lot of women are encouraged to aim for an intervention-free, analgesic-free birth, there’s no denying that. And I agree that when someone is told that a particular course of action is best for their child and then that outcome is not reached, feelings of guilt, anger, and blame might understandably rise to the surface while trying to make sense of why it didn’t go as expected. But the problem is not that the intention to have a physiological birth is unrealistic or flawed, as Jones seems to suggest, but that mothers are often not given adequate support to actually achieve it. I would argue that most of the ‘risks and reality’ she mentions do not lie in birth itself, but in how unprepared many women are for birthing in a system that employs practices which actively thwart and contravene their chances of success.

Jones writes of how during her own pregnancy she dutifully prepared for a natural birth, despite being “suspicious of ideology, of fantasies that concealed old lies.” From the way she describes it, it doesn’t seem that she set out to experience a drug-free birth because she wanted to, but because she felt she should. And we all know what should often results in…resentment and disappointment. What she wanted most, Jones explains, was to have full control over what happened to her. And the way she’d been told to have that control was though the eschewing of intervention and drugs.

Like many first-time mothers, Jones’s labour was long and painful, which she was unprepared for. For this she largely blames the hypnobirthing and antenatal education classes she took, for leading her to believe that birth could be tolerable or empowering in any way. Her vivid descriptions of the agony and helplessness she felt as she laboured were all too familiar, and I felt empathy for what was clearly a traumatic experience for her. Ultimately, Jones felt she had been duped. She writes:

“I felt dismayed by the expectations I had held, as I realised how false and ideologically motivated they were. I had been misled….Remembering the moment when the pain was most severe, I felt furious. Angry that I hadn’t been warned. And even though the phyisical suffering was over, the subsequent silence was a new, lasting violence…What we have come to accept as ‘normal’ birth is, in fact, deeply disturbing for many women.”

Though this was not a new revelation to me, that women can feel traumatised by the pain of labour itself, I was surprised at how intense her anger was. It seems she had wanted to be grabbed by the lapels during her pregnancy and told, ‘Look, this is going to be the most excruciating and horrendous thing you will ever experience, and you will wish you were dead by the end of it’, even though no one can predict what a woman’s experience of birth will be beforehand. Also, let’s be real here. Saying such a thing to a pregnant woman based on someone’s own limited experience is generally not welcome and Jones would have undoubtedly been furious at their negativity and scaremongering if they had done so. It is only with the privilege of hindsight that she can look back at the ‘misinformation’ she was given and wish for the stark truth of a reality that, unfortunately, ended up becoming her own.

In terms of her own births, Jones can and should feel any way she’d like about it, and is justified in talking about them however she wishes. But as a journalist who claims to be interested in exploring the issue beyond the limits of her own experience, this is where the book faltered for me. Instead of examining why the promises of birth so often do not align with the reality and analysing all aspects of this disconnect - including the role of the professionals, environment, and how birth is managed - Jones focuses almost solely on the ‘lies’ she was sold by those who had tried to help her prepare for the birth she claims she wanted but which she admits she was deeply sceptical of.

That is a huge part of the problem though, at least for Jones. Success and fulfillment are not going to come easily if the methods employed to achieve a goal are regarded by the person using them as frivolous, untrustworthy, misleading, false, or even dangerous. It’s as ludicrous as deciding to run a marathon only because other people think you should, spending many months preparing for it in a way that you know deep down is not right for you, and then being surprised when you don’t feel euphoric about running the race and it doesn’t go the way you expected it to.

What Jones seeemed to want far more than a natural birth was a crystal ball that could reveal her fate. She wanted, in her own words, ‘complete control’ of a process that by its very nature cannot be controlled. She was asking for a miracle within a miracle, some kind of iron-clad guarantee that if she inputted X (suffient knowledge and prep) she would achieve outcome Y (a blissful birth and joyous motherhood). Unfortunately, birth doesn’t work that way, no matter how much we wish it could, just as we can’t predict or control how puberty and menopause will go for us. There are so many factors that influence it - so many variations in genetics, health, beliefs, state of mind, circumstances, approach, and how the process is managed - that there is really no such thing as ‘normal’ at all. If anything, positive physiological birth is no longer normal because so few women experience it.

I suspect that much of Jones’s anger is aimed not only at how ill-prepared for the pain of labour she was, but for the challenges of parenthood too. With so many sacchrine societal messages and tropes portraying motherhood as blissful and wonderful when in reality it is often extraordinarily difficult and isolating, most of us, including Jones, have directed our collective rage at the societal constraints that make it so, not against the act of mothering itself. We don’t advocate banishing parenting altogether because it’s hard, we look at how we can improve the conditions in which we parent.

Jones’s refusal to view birth through the same feminist lens with which she examines motherhood is, ultimately, what makes an otherwise good read a let-down for me. A text that centres the industrial medical birthing system and extols the virtues of a historically paternalistic and racist model of birth is neither feminist nor woman-centred and I can’t easily overlook that. That’s not to say that the people, processes, and beliefs around ‘natural’ birth are unproblematic (far from it), but the book felt like a largely one-sided attack based on the author’s own negative experiences.

I would have liked to see Jones analyse how patriarchal structures, cultural norms, and environmental factors have altered our perceptions of what is both possible and likely to occur during birth, and then critique the dissonance between the two in a more well-rounded way. Instead, she chose to portray physiological birth as inherently torturous and traumatising, and anyone who says differently as deluded, disingenuous, and dangerous. Her allusions to wishing she’d listened to the more sensible doctors doesn’t rub me the wrong way only because of my background as a midwife, either. The perpetuation of this kind of authoritative purview contributes not only to a distrust of women’s bodies, but of our choices about what we do with them, too.

Though Jones is correct that no one else has the right to control birth on a woman’s behalf, her belief that the raw power of birth itself can be controlled is at the root of her disillusionment. That says more about how disconnected some women are from the reality of their bodies than whether they have been missold an ideal of birth that doesn’t exist.

As someone who has witnessed countless births, I can say with certainty that how it unfolds is rarely black or white. The act of becoming a mother contains all the colours and hues available on the spectrum, from the darkest of dark to the lightest of light, and everything in between. What a privilege it is to have seen this facet of humanity play out in so many women’s experiences, and what a shame that some, like Lucy Jones, can’t recognise what lies outside the boundaries of their own.