Here is an urgent examination of the modern institution of motherhood, which seeks to unshackle all parents from oppressive social norms. Most importantly, it gave me a framework and vocabulary for my own experience of matrescence and the tremendous changes that pregnancy, birth, and motherhood bring.

It's a simple message but Lucy Jones looks at it by using so many interesting and diverse ideas and places that it always stays vital. If at times there is an uneasy tension in this book between the science, memoir, social commentary and flashes of creative writing, this is a testament to its ambition. I'm in matrescence now and this book is the first one who's helped me throughout this tough, amazing but overwhelming and socially neglected period of my life. Initially I felt they jarred with the body of the work, which follows Jones’s journey into motherhood and is divided according to a series of themes, including birth, the brain, sleep and society.

Not long into her pregnancy with her first child, a daughter, she realised the extent to which outdated and sexist expectations still govern motherhood: concepts like “natural childbirth” and “maternal instinct,” the judgemental requirement for exclusive breastfeeding, the idea that a parent should “enjoy every minute” of their offspring’s babyhood rather than admitting depression or overwhelm. BUt moving beyond this close personal group, you are bombarded with sights and sounds and advices on mothers whose bodies bounced back, mothers who are climbing the corporate ladder AND mothering, mothers who are excelling at work and also helping their school going kids excel. A purely scientific approach might have been dry; a social history well-trod and worthy; a memoir too inward-looking to make wider points.

The fox has for centuries been held as the incarnation of such unlovely traits as deviousness, cunning and cruelty. The best book I've ever read about motherhood' Jude Rogers, Observer 'I kept scribbling in the margins: 'We need to know this stuff!And yet this life-altering transition has been sorely neglected by science, medicine and philosophy.

This is the first time I’ve written a review but this book provoked strong feelings as a mother deep into matrescence. Matrescence, a word coined by anthropologist Dana Raphael in the 1970s, is the process of becoming a mother.I absolutely related to lots of the book, and really tried to take the first few chapters from an objective point of view because I did not have the same experiences when it came to child birth and breastfeeding, but I do completely understand that the emphasis was on the pressure that the ‘natural mother’ rhetoric puts on women. There’s the medical side, but also the equally important social implications: new mothers need so much more practical and mental health support, and their unpaid care work must be properly valued by society. It talks about the day to day realities of child bearing and about how the institution of motherhood in most countries expects the mother to be a village by herself and renounce most of personal ambitions or desires on the altar of the child, without offering her any valuable support. Jones's lyrical, compassionate exploration of the ever-shifting boundaries of selfhood that evolved within our interconnected biosphere, confronts today's societal demands for individual autonomy, culminating in a passionate and powerful maternal roar for change. During pregnancy, childbirth, and early motherhood, women undergo a far-reaching physiological, psychological and social metamorphosis.