Status Updates From Matrescence: On Pregnancy, ...

🤯🤯🤯

We need to ditch the sexist lexicon. Lactation failure. Hostile uterus. Incompetent cervix. We need new words and phrases. Our understanding of matrescence is limited by the lack of language to describe it. ‘We have become the first civilization which lacks a discourse on the complexity of motherhood,’ says Kristeva.13 We urgently need that language

The way we approach reproductive labour – the way we treat mothering bodies and minds – is similar to the way we destroy the living world, habitats, human life, and health and wellbeing, in the fetish for growth at any cost. We do it all in the service of an extractivist capitalism which uses and exploits ‘public goods’ – human and non-human life, in other words – in order to confer advantages and-

But for the majority of mothers, working conditions are in direct conflict with family life. Working culture hasn’t caught up with women needing and wanting to work, nor allowed fathers adequate opportunities to take up caring responsibilities and equalize the division of labour

Care work is hardcore. It is life and death work. It is fevers and risk and birth and illness and screaming and love and transference. It is transformation and hope. It is quick thinking and deep patience. It is resentment and anger. It is sacrifice and gift.

In fact, the work of motherhood was much harder than the paid work I had done previously (which, admittedly, wasn’t saving lives). There were no breaks and I often worked for sixteen or more hours a day