Lucy expected many things to change when she had her baby. Her brain wasn’t one of them

Giving birth and becoming a mother may be a natural experience, but chaos, bewilderment and loneliness are as much a part of this transformation as joy, ecstasy and awakening.

Lucy Jones felt all this along with awe, despair, shock, isolation and rage.

Matrescence: a time of transformation.Credit: Getty Images

Along with the birth of her first child eight years ago, she birthed a new identity, one which she felt utterly unprepared for and misinformed about.

Pregnancy, she had believed up to this moment, would be a “transient physical experience”.

“The baby would grow in my body as if it were a box or a flower pot, and then when she was born, I would return to my old self,” says Jones, a London-based science writer and author of Matrescence – a concept coined in 1975 to describe the complex process of becoming a mother.

“I had no idea that this is the most drastic endocrine event in life, or that the brain is changing shape in multiple areas, or that it would be a very complex psychological and existential experience, too.”

A 2024 study published in Nature Neuroscience found that women’s brains undergo changes in almost every area during pregnancy. Those changes occur on a near-weekly basis.

While total grey matter volume and cortical thickness decrease throughout pregnancy, researchers believe these changes may be “a second stage of brain maturing”, like the remodelling and refinement that happens during adolescence.

The flux may even dwarf what we experience during our teenage years. Neuromaternal researcher Susana Carmona describes it as “probably the most intense hormonal event that a human being can go through.”

Hormonal and brain changes are only part of the picture, a picture that typically glosses over the gnarlier parts of the experience.

Jones expected it would be hard work, of course, but she had also grown up with the iconography of Mary, the mother of Jesus. It was all tranquillity and soft lighting.

“Motherhood looked chilled, ‘natural’, the baby Jesus was never having a tantrum and Mary always looked relaxed,” she said.

What motherhood did not involve, in her mind’s eye, was 43-hour labours, bright fluorescent hospital lights, second-degree tears, haemorrhages and anal sphincter injuries.

“It wasn’t pale pink; it was brown of shit and red of blood,” Jones, now a mother of three, writes in her book. “And it was the most political experience of my life, rife with conflict, domination, drama, struggle and power.”

Author of Matrescence, Lucy Jones.

The physical mess and pain that can occur are as natural as a smooth transition.

As humans evolved to have big brains (with big heads to match) and the human pelvis (and birth canal) became narrower to facilitate walking upright, it made childbirth more difficult. One in three Australian women experience birth trauma, and approximately one in 25 of these women will develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

That’s before we touch on breastfeeding difficulties, feelings about motherhood that didn’t fit inside the neat, jubilant square, being the afterthought in a child-centric society, and the loneliness of doing it without a community to help us.

“Evolutionary history and anthropology tell us that the way women are mothering today – often alone, indoors, without comparable companionship or social support, and under oppressive maternal ideals – are relatively new conditions of industrial capitalism,” Jones explains.

She suspects all of this, as well as the minimising – “baby blues”, “morning sickness” – or omission of the full experience from the narrative, is at least partly to blame for the increase in maternal mental health issues.

Some research suggests that depression in pregnancy is, on average, 51 per cent more common among young mothers today than among their mothers’ generation 25 years ago. In Australia, about one in five experience anxiety or depression during pregnancy or following birth.

The solution, she argues, lies in a society that centres life and planetary wellbeing instead of economic growth.

“But in the meantime: fairer economic policies and parental leave, public spaces which are friendly for new humans and their caregivers, investment in healthcare and research (we know so little about postnatal depression, for example), and a culture that allows new parents to be honest about how they feel and ask for help,” she said.

Digging into the science was liberating for Jones, who was diagnosed with postpartum depression after the birth of her first child.

“Knowing what is happening to the maternal brain, that the idea of ‘scattiness’ and ‘baby brain’ is a misogynistic misnomer, and actually, how amazing the parental brain is was very freeing and interesting to me,” she says.

“And learning about evolutionary history helps me to realise that [feeling depressed] was actually a reasonable response to struggle in modern motherhood, rather than something to be ashamed of.”

Looking to the world around us also provides solace and perspective to Jones, who feels “fundamentally changed”.

In her book, she describes seeking out slime moulds in the forest. Iridescent and brightly coloured, slime moulds spend part of the life cycle as fruiting bodies that can look like minuscule mushrooms before they change into a more animal state: a thin, slick mass of acid yellow that grows and moves over bark and mulch, that can solve problems, such as mazes, learn, anticipate and “teach”.

Like her, like all women who become mothers, it undergoes a radical, irreversible metamorphosis that is full of beauty and ugliness and mundanity, and all a “natural” part of the growth:

“Seeing that change and process are a hallmark of our world, and that that is how it is and can’t truly be resisted.”

Lucy Jones will appear at the Sydney Opera House as part of All About Women on 9 March 2025. In-person tickets are now sold out, however tickets to view her event as a livestream are still available.

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