In a landmark study published in Nature in 2016, researchers provided evidence, for the first time, that pregnancy renders pronounced changes in brain structure. Soon after, neuroscientists found that the impact of pregnancy on the brain is as significant as the impact of adolescence. The new science of motherhood shows us what many feel: that becoming a mother is more of a big deal than western society allows. In fact, after childhood and adolescence, there is no other time in a human’s life that entails such dramatic psychological and physical change. Matrescence took me on a journey of reminescence through my own pregnancies and early years of motherhood, eliciting wry recognition, surprise at new evidence and insight, and gratitude for a work that really sees what it is to mother -- Clare Chambers Foxes Unearthed: A Story of Love and Loathing in Modern Britain was published by Elliott & Thompson in 2016.

I was challenged, comforted, educated and nourished by this book ... It is the single most powerful, life-changing, heartachingly healing thing I have been given ... The kind of book we must ensure every one of us reads -- Kerri ni Dochartaigh

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Nature writing in recent years has often been about landscapes granting peace, even if that peace has mostly been limited to white men walking up mountains and having epiphanies. (If they tried that today, the police would send them home.) These books, each in their own distinct way, take that idea and twist it. During pregnancy, childbirth, and early motherhood, women undergo a far-reaching physiological, psychological and social metamorphosis. Partly because of all this biological change, the perinatal period is a vulnerable time. As many as 20 per cent of women develop a mental health problem in the first year of new motherhood – including mild and moderate to severe depression, anxiety, PTSD and psychosis. The likelihood of depressive episodes doubles during matrescence. The figure rises for women of colour and those in disadvantaged socioeconomic groups. It talks about the rawness of emotions that being a mother brings, the infinite joy and the helplessness, the initial isolation and the power of healing a community brings, the reshaping of a mother's brain (literally) and the way of looking at life expands and contracts at the same time. If you only read one book about what it means to become a mother, let it be this one. Sure, there are a million books out there about how to take care of a child (and most of them are contradicting each other, or shift gears every couple of years), but very few about what it means to become a mother, to go through matrescence.

A wild and beautiful book ... a book that will be passed among friends and will no doubt bring solace ... Reading this, I felt a jolt of recognition ... more than six years later I can still feel the searing, silencing shame. I wish someone could have handed me Matrescence Sophie McBain, New Statesman A vital, hopeful book ... to read Matrescence is to emerge chastened and ready for change -- Marianne Levy ― i Paper In the UK, there are positive signs of change. After sterling work by the charity Pregnant then Screwed, the government’s spring budget announced plans for new funded childcare hours. Currently, most parents are eligible for up to 30 hours of childcare only after a child turns three, which leaves many women unable to return to work. The new plans will extend this to parents of children from nine months old. It seems the motherhood penalty – the systemic disadvantages to mothers in the workplace – is finally being taken seriously.

Losing Eden | Penguin

That is not this book, though, and even for mothers who found matrescence a smoother experience, there is much to be gleaned as Jones skilfully elucidates the monumental shifts it brings, from the foetal cells that remain in a mother’s body for decades to evidence that pregnancy and birth has a dramatic, long-term impact on the brain that may even be permanent. Indeed, the chapter on the maternal brain is especially fascinating and, more importantly, validating for those of us who feel society’s minimising of matrescence flies in the face of our experience of it. This feeling is neatly summarised by Jones when she writes: “The closest I had ever been to death, to birth, to growth, to the co-conscious, to rapture, to rupture – was, according to the world around me, boring.” To read these words feels affirming, even radicalising. I find myself inwardly cheering at one point when another mother describes how “insipid/idealistic portrayals of motherhood made me less interested in it as a young person. I thought it was boring when it’s one of the most extreme socio-political experiences I have ever been through.”