Sahar’s Reviews > Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood > Status Update

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

It was time now to be satisfied by constant, total, isolated caregiving. The aspirations, desires and pleasures of the past were in direct conflict with my new life. The more I shrank my self, I sensed, the better mother I would be.

This newfound ‘traditional’ code of intensive motherhood clashed with the capitalistic culture I had been instructed in: to be, first and foremost, a worker, an earner and a consumer.

Motherhood is an occupation in all senses of the word. Those who have occupied me are now living both outside and inside me. By which I mean, sometimes there is no membrane between us, despite appearances. They have annexed my consciousness

It is interesting that both the Qur’an and the Bible contain a much stronger sense of the physical and psychological experience of matrescence than our dominant secular discourse. As the scholar Irene Oh shows, the Qur’an tells Muslims to revere their mothers because of the ‘hardship’ they go through to give birth and wean children.

‘Just as children are absolutely dependent on their parents for sustenance, so … are parents, especially their mothers, dependent on a greater society for economic provision. If a community values its children it must cherish their parents.’

In both depression and pregnancy, for example, there is an increase in cytokines, the inflammatory signalling markers in cells. Other, similar changes are seen in serotonergic pathways, which are involved in mood and mood disorders.