TONTS. - Matrescence with Lucy Jones

Episode Date: April 8, 2024

Lucy Jones is an investigative journalist and author. She has written extensively on culture, science and na­ture. Her articles have been published on BBC Earth and in The Sunday Times, The Guardian and the New Statesman. Her first book, Foxes Un­earthed, received the Society of Authors’ Roger Deakin Award. She has also written the book Losing Eden which was long-listed for the Wainwright Prize and received a Society of Authors’ K Blundell Trust Award. The Times and Telegraph named it a book of the year (2020) and the paperback became a Times' bestseller (2021).In her latest work Matrescence Lucy Jones presents her radical examination of the transition into motherhood and how it affects the mind, brain and body. These seismic effects are largely unrepresented across literature and the arts, and speaking about motherhood in anything other than pastel hues remains, for the most part, taboo. Jones offers an urgent examination of the modern institution of motherhood and seeks to unshackle parents from oppressive social norms.For more from Lucy Jones you can head to her website To find out more about me and the work I am doing please head to https://www.clairetonti.com or https://www.instagram.com/clairetonti/And if you or someone you know needs support COPE has a brilliant directory where you can find resources in your area.http://www.cope.org.auYou can also contact the show at [e-mail]: RAW CollingsSocial Media: Maisie JG Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which I create, speak and write today. They're a wondery people of the Kulin Nation and pay my respect to their elders past, present and merging, acknowledging that the sovereignty of this land has never been ceded. I want to acknowledge the people who have given birth on this land, raised children on this land for generations, connected to country and spirit. Hello, welcome to Tons, a podcast of in-depth interviews about emotions and the way they shape our lives. I'm your host, Claire Tonti, and I'm so glad you are here. Each week, I speak to

writers, activists, experts, thinkers, artists, and deeply feeling humans about their lives. And this week, I have a very special guest, the British author, Lucy Jones. Lucy and I have a really special story, actually. So I released an album called Matrescence in February last year, and Lucy released her third book, Matrescence, in the June. We ended up doing a show together in Basingstoke, her hometown, and we did an interview there together where I performed my album and then we had a discussion and I interviewed her and she did a reading from her beautiful book. Unfortunately, the audio from that interview got lost in the ether and so I invited Lucy Jones on to Taunts to do another interview and I'm just so glad I did. Before I tell you a little

bit more about her and her extraordinary work, I wanted to also let you know that I am coming back again to the UK and Lucy and I are going to be doing a festival called Matrescence in Exeter on the 21st and 22nd of June. Now there's more announcements to come and I haven't actually announced that she's going to be a part of it, but I thought the Tons audience could find out first. There's a whole list of incredible speakers and artists that are going to be coming to run workshops.

We're going to be creating spaces in Exeter with the wonderful producer, Lizzie Hummer, who is really passionate about teaching women about art and creativity to move through their matricence. We're creating spaces where people are able to breastfeed, where they can wear headsets so that even if they have to leave for caring responsibilities outside the building, they can still be a part of the panel discussion, speakers, artists, all of the things. I'll be singing some songs from my album and also running some panels as well with Lizzie. So more details to come.

Other dates that I will be in the UK, and I'm just going to let you know about them very quickly. I'll be in Dublin on the 13th of June in the evening. I'm going to be there at Mum Talks 10am Cafe En Seine in Dublin as well. Mum Talks is an incredible organisation who run kind of community gatherings for mums that can bring their babies. 15th of June, I'll be in Cardiff performing at the Every Woman Festival. I'm going to be performing on the festival stage there and running a workshop separately as well. So tickets are on their website. I'll be in

Abergavenny on the 16th of June with a poet called Lily Redwood, her new book, My God, You Will Be Blown Away By It. And then as I said, the 21st and 22nd of June, I'll be in Exeter with Lucy, my very special guest today. Something else to tell you as well is that I have a new song in the world called To Breathe, which is an ambient track based around a longer song called Love that I wrote, kind of inspired by Lucy's book, Matrescence, really, and also the feeling that I have while walking through the woods. There's layers to that song. One of the things I reflected on too in my mothering and something that I talk about with Lucy in this episode is the need for mothers, I think, to find space in their day

to breathe. Meditation for me and the natural world provides that space and time where I can not be covered in banana or even where I can take my kids and we can just run and take in our natural world, which I think sometimes in our modern, you know, kind of busy lives we forget to do. Something else Lucy talks about in this episode, which really touched me so deeply, was her kind of disconnection from music after she had her kids and how in listening to my album, she kind of resonated with the songs because they came from a similar place to what she was existing in, in that space of matrescence, this kind of strange metamorphosis that we find ourselves going through. And I felt the same when

I read her book, like I'd met a kindred spirit connected by mycelium networks. Let me read a little bit more about what Lucy has done in her life. She is an extraordinary writer. She previously worked at NME and the Daily Telegraph and her writing on culture, science and nature has been published in GQ, BBC Wildlife, The Sunday Times, The Guardian and The New Statesman. Her first book, Foxes Unearthed, won the Society of Authors Roger Deakin Award in 2015. Her second book, the Times bestseller,

Losing Eden, was long listed for the Wainwright Prize and was a Telegraph and Times Book of the Year. And her latest work, Matrescence, has received accolades all over the place. It's just so resonant and so vital reading, I think, for anyone, not just for someone who's given birth, but just for all of us to understand where we've come from and where as a culture we need to be moving. Let me read a little bit of the blurb here. During pregnancy, childbirth and early motherhood, women undergo a far-reaching physiological, psychological and social metamorphosis. That's, I think, why Lucy and I are so obsessed with cocoons and moths and dragonflies and slime molds, things that are tiny in nature that transition.

There is no other time in a human's life course that entails such dramatic change other than adolescence. And yet this life-altering transition has been sorely neglected by science, medicine and philosophy. Its seismic effects go largely unrepresented across literature and the arts. Speaking about motherhood as anything other than a pastel-hued dream remains, for the most part, taboo. In this groundbreaking, deeply personal investigation, acclaimed journalist and author Lucy Jones brings to light the emerging concept of matrescence, drawing on new research across various fields, neuroscience and evolutionary biology, psychoanalysis and existential therapy,

sociology, economics and ecology. Jones shows how the changes in the maternal mind, brain and body are far more profound, wild and enduring than we have been led to believe. She reveals the dangerous consequences of our neglect of the maternal experience and interrogates the patriarchal and capitalist systems that have created the untenable situation mothers face today. Here is an urgent examination of the modern institution of motherhood, which seeks to unshackle all parents from oppressive social norms. As it deepens our understanding of matrescence, it raises vital questions about motherhood and femininity, interdependence and individual identity, as well as about our relationships with each other in the living world.

All right, let's get to it. Here is this very magical human being called Lucy Jones. Need some sun on the old face. You actually look really beautiful and very cozy, but I, you do, but I know what you mean too when you're feeling like that and hot. So it's funny funny I woke up this morning because I was thinking about what I was going to ask you first and I just came to me and I had this sort of question I don't know it just sort of popped out of my dream I wanted to ask you what your relationship is to the moon oh what a lush question um I love that it's such a good one to start with one of the first things that I ever

said apparently one of the first things I said to my mum was when I saw a new moon Jesus has cut up the moon Jesus because I grew up in a really Christian home and cut up the moon because the new moon you know the new moon looks like it's been cut out so like I obviously don't remember that because I was like two years old but um feel it's obviously been a character of interest since like my earliest noticing um I on the one hand my relationship at the moment with the moon is quite minimal because I'm in the house at night every night really like I'm not out in the evenings like I was because I have young children but at the same time we got a telescope a really really strong telescope and so for the

first time in my life I was able to see the moon really close up and see like the craters and the lakes. And we got a moon map and we looked at like all the different names for like the mountains and the moon. It kind of always amazes me when I look at the moon, I go, oh, my God, it's new. The time just passes passes doesn't it yeah I remember in your book you talk about that that after you had a baby and you're in that matrescence period that time sped up for you do you still feel like that in relation to I guess the moon but also the changing of the season yes I really do and even more so since my children have started school, there's something about being in the rhythm of a school year and a school term where the year is split into these half terms in England

and then we have a two-week Christmas holiday, a two-week Easter holiday, and then four to five weeks in the summer. And I guess because with young children, there's quite a lot of ritual and we're preparing for Easter now. We just had Valentine's Day and Pancake Day. And all these kind of like cultural celebrations and rituals come quite thick and fast. Whereas I kind of lost that in young adulthood. It was my 20s, just kind of, you know, it was like a long, lovely time of being with friends and exploring the world.

And of course, I mean, it's kind of obvious, but like how quickly children change. You know, it's like my oldest, my seven-year-old has just lost like most of her fun time. And yeah, time bends for sure in the tressings. It does, doesn't it? I struggle with time in general like i think i'm never sure how long 10 minutes is or how long half an hour is and i'm potentially late for that reason so i'll be in the woods looking at a tree or something and suddenly it's due to time and with kids you do you know you'd have this sort of little person that is so

gorgeous in the way they are now. And then you don't want them to change, but also you want them to grow. And it's like, that's that song lyric that I have in my song. It's just, it's constantly changing. But then sometimes those days go forever. I wanted to read a little section of your book that I felt like really explained how I felt when I first brought my son home. And then I want to ask you about it. And we're also going to get to talk a lot about trees

because we have a very big shared love of that. This is from page 86. Back at home with our daughter, just one day old, our flat felt different as if I'd stepped through a portal into a parallel universe or onto the set of a film. In my arms, a collection of trillions of atoms that had cycled through generations of ancient supernova explosions. We were both so old, made from stars born billions of years ago. We were both so new, she breathing outside of me, I being made again in matrescence. I couldn't believe my eyes, I couldn't sleep for the beauty of her,

little pink mouth, dough ball cheeks, plant stalks, soft bones, her astral holiness, body of my body, flesh of my flesh. I heard the contraction and expansion of the universe, bouncing into existence, new galaxies, axons, dendrites, cells and love, cells and love. I just wanted to say thank you again for this book because as I dipped into it again to refer for this interview, I just kept finding new bits of gold you know like gold flecks in silt and that's one of them can you explain for us how you felt in that very first kind of matrescence space coming home with your daughter and thank you so much for reading that passage so beautifully and for your

kind words about matrescence you've been such an encouragement and a supporter for me since the very beginning and it it means so much and you know the amazing serendipity of both of our matrescence works it's just really special well I think you know it was I we I had one night in the hospital after my daughter was born and then we were home the next day so she was born at 4 p.m at tea time on a really hot September afternoon boiling hot in London and we walked into the flat and like I said that passage it felt like you're walking onto a film set and I remember the emotions just being so tectonic absolute awe and wonder and like disbelief at this beautiful baby like there's very little I think more beautiful on earth than a newborn baby unbelievably beautiful and then she was and then complete terror you know of what

what how to keep this baby safe and what to do and probably some birth trauma and you know we're thinking quite a lot about kind of birth and and trauma and so on and I think even though my birth was like scare quotes textbook um whatever that means and we were both okay. It had been really long labor. I had not slept for like three days. But like a lot of women, the experience of it had felt very shocking and very frightening. So I think in that space, I was in shock, probably, like very physically in shock in my body. And then with this like totally eclipsing world-changing love it was the most kind of probably dramatic cosmic frightening overwhelming experience of

my life those few days and like looking back on it now I kind of think you know I have a loving loving husband loving family but one of the reasons why I think the word matrescence is so transformative and you know this movement to to hold and and acknowledge women in their transition into motherhood is so important is because I think we've just lost sight of like how starkly vulnerable a mother or birthing person is in those early moments and days and weeks and you're like I felt like wind open like so porous and so vulnerable it's so it's everything isn't it it's so huge there's that phrase um a newborn mother that I know you found in your research I think it was Dana Raphael you said that and it is it's it's like that it's so crazy in our culture that we don't have that

kind of honoring and cherishing and that isolating of the mother that you know we're not isolating I mean we're isolated in our homes but I mean in terms of her resting or the person who's giving birth resting and being kind of cradled almost and instead it's totally that was totally my experience you just feel like you've kind of thrown out the door of the hospital with this earth-shattering thing having experienced a huge amount of trauma and I know you're writing your book about how sometimes it'd be nice if women talk about just like wanting to break a leg so they can go and have a break in hospital and someone to make them food. That's just wild, isn't it?

This little phrase popped up for me in reading your book again. I felt hoodwinked by the culture or the hoodwinking of things could you talk into a little bit about that what do you think has been happening with this hoodwinking of mothers and motherhood yeah thank you for picking up on that I think that word actually is really key no one's ever asked about that I think that's in the first paragraph and so in the opening of the book I explain a bit how I felt hoodwinked and And actually, it was like the writing of Matrescence and the research was a way of working out why I felt that and what that meant. So I had this kind of like quite diffuse, just sense that there was like, there was many elements of deception around the experience of becoming a mother and that when I looked even closer that these these old myths these ideas actually connected with

like the kind of bedrock of our culture ideas so for example in terms of hoodwinking, I had a very, like, extremely nauseous pregnancy. So I was, like, extremely nauseous for about five months of it the whole time. But, you know, before that happened and during, I was told about morning sickness. So I thought, OK, I'll just be, you know, it'll just be in the morning. I'll just be sick in the morning. That'll be fine. You know, and it wasn't like that. I was sick the whole time. Not the worst kind of sickness that people get but in my research i found that you know women if you minimize health conditions like pregnancy sickness by calling them morning sickness

it sounds like a kind of thing that doesn't really matter but it really does because it it contributes kind of shame and stigma and makes people not want to research or find better treatments and I think it's all part of this kind of impulse to silence maternal subjectivity and the maternal experience same goes for birth like I had been in a culture which suggested that if I did my breathing exercises and stuck to my birth plan my birth wouldn't be very painful it would be straightforward and you know that that wasn't the case and actually the my experience of birth is that the the physical repercussions of birth can be really significant and are so so so underspoken about before the fact.

And then thinking about hoodwinking and, for example, the very blanket depictions of motherhood in our culture, which are in the mainstream, this kind of pastel-hued dream of the maternal instinct and the mother being able to see the baby and it being kind of happy and calm and peaceful and you know babies with colic and babies who cry it's just not like that you know it's also an incredibly confronting and challenging psychological experience becoming a mother. It can bring up so much of your early childhood, your attachment to people, your sense of self, your identity, what your nervous system is able to withstand.

It is an incredibly, you know, you can run like a rollerco coaster of emotions within an hour. And then I guess like just expanding a bit in terms of this idea of hoodwinking, one of the things that really shocked me was that I really thought that like me and my husband were equal in terms of like social freedoms and social status and our kind of autonomy and while we you know we both want an egalitarian partnership and you know we do have that kind of up to a point now but that wasn't my experience that there was a biological experience which took me by surprise and there was a social experience where I felt that I was stepping into a social institution of motherhood which actually had systems and

structures and rules which didn't didn't happen for for fathers or men. So, for example, like in England, mothers are penalised financially. We get penalised in our pensions. Fathers who want to look after their children, it's still not really socially acceptable in the workplace. We don't yet have a culture where we value nurturing to the point where we see it as like what it is which is extremely valuable important work that like all like all genders should can do and should be able to do so yeah it essentially it like erupted and blew apart everything I knew about the entire world.

It's just a small thing. Yeah, I completely resonate so much with that. And I know even just reading the word matrescence and for you it was a shared experience, I had the same feeling where I suddenly went, oh, there's something wrong with me. This is monumentally giant and another coming of age, just like adolescence and should be treated as such. And it's just so strange in our Western culture that we don't have ritual around it in the same way.

I really wanted to say as well, listening to you talk on page eight, you talk a bit about how you realised once you became pregnant you had all this like idea about motherhood and mothering as kind of less than which I hadn't realized I had too and I'd had I sort of thought of myself as a feminist as well and yet suddenly I felt like hiding my motherhood or my pregnancy I don't want to be one of those, you know, mumsy mums or, you know, that self-sacrifice was an essential component of being a good mother. And that was kind of what I knew about the whole thing. Why do you think that is that we had that kind of idea that mothering is somehow,

I don't know, something to be like slightly embarrassed about or less than. I think it's such an interesting question, really interesting subject. Like my read and understanding of it is that feminists, post-war feminists, second-wave feminists, had to work really hard to like unshackle women from the home and to fight for equality in the workplace and and it's almost like it went slightly too far like there's this kind of queasiness about essentialism and maternalism and which is is understandable or this kind of this fear which I understand I felt it myself that by by bringing the motherhood question in you are then reducing

a woman to the thing which has basically been used to oppress her by patriarchy for centuries. What I think we're seeing now is a time where we really need a feminism for mothers and a feminism for caregivers. So whereas to my mind, liberal feminism has been particularly focused on things like smashing the glass ceiling, you know, getting ahead of the workplace, all really important things. There has been this like blind spot around motherhood. And the fact is that most women will become mothers at some point. And like mothers and women are becoming mothers today at a time of maternal mental health crisis

really i mean i don't know if it's the same for you guys but like we have a real bad maternity crisis in the uk um like a real shortage of midwives and just just inadequate like health care and infrastructure and i i think that perhaps we've got further enough away from this like complete disavowal and fear of the maternal within feminism that now we can say it's okay we're both we're like women in the world with autonomy and we're also mothers and we need to like fight for those rights as well andrea O'Reilly is an amazing, incredible, unsung academic in Canada. And she has developed this idea, this thing called matricentric feminism, which is saying like, you know, lots of different types of feminism are needed.

But there also needs to be a feminism for mothers, you know, which says that mothering is important to women and and it's meaningful and you know we require particular fights and battles for the maternal rights and so on but yeah i guess i think in terms of like why do we devalue care work and caregiving i think that is so deeply embedded in in how kind of western culture and philosophy has created this individual who's often well a man without dependence and that is the kind of like ideal citizen you know as we've moved out of collective care networks and more and into a more individualized society

it's almost like there's no framework for caregiving yeah i don't know what do you think oh good question i agree i think like at the beginning there's that quote in your book from shula myth firestone dialectic of sex the case of feminist revolution they write women in love are underpinnings examine them and you threaten the very structure of culture and i agree with you and i i've been thinking a lot about this that our our western culture in australia it's very much the same we have a lot of crisis that one in five women here have postnatal depression one in three experience birth trauma and we're going through a parliamentary inquiry in new south wales at the moment about the system and birth trauma

that's just one state in our big continent not a lot of people but you know in australia and the site crashed they had so many women and they opened it up for it nationally. Had so many women writing with their stories of trauma that the site broke, which is just an indication of the state of affairs. And I agree with you. I think it's the moving away from community care. And when you really start to examine women and our bodies, how work how we're cyclical how love works and look at it like you do under a microscope you start to see the essence of what we are which are creatures on a rock spinning around the sun reliant on the earth that we walk on the air we breathe we're not sort of human doings that are just productivity machines in a capitalist

you know culture it's so deep it just goes straight to the heart of all of it the brokenness of treating people like commodities and then sort of disregarding care because it doesn't make money you know and I think that's essentially where it comes from. And we need to somehow try and rebuild so much of that. I know when I lived in Tanzania, we lived in a boma, which is like four other houses in a village with a central courtyard. We had our veggies growing. There was a cow that lived in the center and the kids and dogs ran around. And I mean, look, there's a lot of social things going on with the medical side of things and but everyone lived in these little homes with like maybe two or three rooms

with all of their family and all the mothers would sit outside of their homes washing and cooking and laughing and watching their kids run around with chickens and dogs and all of their work was external to the home so you could see it and therefore it was really valued and I know when I was teaching my students this is connected so much it's a long story but my students would come into high school and what was valued there was how beautifully crisp your shirt was you know how when you're a cool kid in high school it would be about like I don't know ripped jeans and like kind of like being very kind of rebellious over there it was treasured how well you had looked after your clothes and your hair was like a particular way and they took so much pride in shining their shoes and and their school books

and and tools and things and and I just thought yeah, that's a long way of saying I think the way we do things is lacking in that community. So I guess it's about how we then go and build that, which is a big question in and of itself. Big time. It's so interesting that I think that the real, like, separation of the private and the public that basically happened like post-industrialization like starting in britain europe and spreading like at that point where basically women's work which was significant was then essentially taken away with men going into the factories and like

the land enclosures and from that point it seems like it was made so invisible but when you say you know how can it change I think there is there's like such a sense now that there's such a lot of stigma and shame and silence around just talking about like maternal mental health and that's why I think like matrescence is such a powerful word and concept because it's kind of you know I'm not ashamed of having had a diagnosis of post-natal depression but you know I can write about having post-natal depression, like partly because of my privilege, like, you know, white middle-class women I'm not going to be potentially discriminated against.

But there's a lot of stigma around things like post-natal depression in different social groups and just anywhere, which there absolutely shouldn't be. But matrescence is kind of, I think, so powerful because it's kind of, it's universal, but it's kind of neutral. Like, you know, you can say to someone, like, how is your matrescence? And it can describe both the, like, crazily, like, enlivening, cosmic, life-shatteringly positive stuff. But it can also, you know, it acknowledges that this is a major transition and as we all know transitions are normally complex and vulnerable making and you know can be lonely and your brain is literally

changing shape so i think that like nutrescence is so powerful in its way of giving women a chance to express what it is like for them um You know, we all talk about the baby. How's the baby? We love babies. Of course we do. But then my, like, what I think I've seen is that, like, people don't want to complain about motherhood because they think when they're saying something about their baby, you know, and it's not that.

We have to, like, separate, you know, it it's not that we have to like separate you know love for children to uh criticism of like the institution of motherhood and the things which need to be so much better i think we're only really scratching the surface of that there's a lot of silence and shame and stigma and even saying actually you know it was really not great my birth or I think we're meant to say oh it's fine because the baby's fine we're fine we're alive but like you know there's more to it than that and we can build a world which is kinder and more supportive and um more like true to our interdependence and our vulnerability what did it feel like to have postnatal depression like looking back i was diagnosed with postnatal depression but the more i learned about how the brain changes in matricence and a more kind of trauma-informed way of thinking about

matricence. I wonder if it was more anxiety, postnatal anxiety, potentially related to birth trauma. I'd had depression before, I'd had clinical depression before, but I never really expected it to happen when I had a child. I was a very wanted child. I was very happy to become a mother. So it felt, I think the whole experience itself, it was frightening. I think I was in a state of high alert, high anxiety and fighting flight and incredibly sleep deprived you know getting like four hours sleep night broken i mean i i don't really see how anyone can not like potentially get mentally ill if you're not sleeping well enough for months and months um then there was so much going on there it brought up a lot of stuff in me

and my own attachment patterns it also was a very lonely time and not many of my friends had kids at the same time there's all these kind of factors which you know despite my privilege and my like you know supportive loving husband and family you know essentially spending time most days on your own with a crying baby I just think it's a recipe for a lot of people for disaster you know or at least not thriving and at the same time I didn't discover the word matrescence until my baby was nine months old and so until that point I really thought there must be something really wrong with me like everyone is just saying enjoy every minute you know this is this should be the happiest time of my life everyone like everyone seems to be able to

soothe their baby or breastfeed properly or blah blah blah and then when I when I read the word the tressence and we went back to the original essay about it, that was just such a lightning bolt moment of like, huh, okay, like, actually, this is a really big transition. My brain has changed shape, like hormonally, biologically. This is not like the transient event in pregnancy that I thought it was. This has actually changed me and it made sense of this like metamorphosis that I felt I was undergoing and it took away just some of the kind of shame

and a sense that there's something wrong with me and everything like okay and then it wasn't a smooth journey after that but that that really helped yeah throughout your book it's one of the things i love about it so you have a deep love of the earth and nature which is something funny my son said to me in the car the other day said oh mom you know how you like nature it's like the earth that we walk on and then everything is interconnected to yes i do like nature um it's funny sometimes i think i mean the thing that we're made of yes we like it um it's just so funny the way they yeah think about things sometimes but i love that you draw from nature and the transitions that the kind of um different parts and elements of nature that can

be quite dark or really just fascinating transformations, you know, that snakes shed their skin, even that the moon we think actually came from inside the earth and then came out of it. I mean, that's so fascinating. The concept of mycelium networks and fungi that are connecting underneath the earth and these kind of mother trees that are caring for trees like seedlings and it it strikes me that's such a beautiful way to describe matrescence because it it's echoed so much in the world that we see around us can you kind of give us an overall if someone had just stumbled into this you know into you into never heard of matrescence before could you give like a headline view of what it actually is essentially at its core sort of

snapshot i know that's tricky so i'm not like a matrescence expert or anything but i would go with the original definition by dana rafael who was the late American anthropologist. So she simply defined matrescence as the process of becoming a mother. And it's obviously can be a physical change, but it's emotional, psychological, spiritual, involves changes in relationship with everyone around you, your identity and your social status in a group, in your day-to-day activity. So she wrote about it in an essay in a book called Being Female, which was published in, I think, 1974. She wrote of how in most societies in the world,

matrescence is seen as this social process. It's even seen as a kind of existential crisis or the biggest life crisis that can happen to a woman. And therefore, the social group will support the mother becoming with rites and rituals and and help her in her journey to become a mother um and she can then rafael compares it to what it was like in the 70s in the states which i think it is now you know a woman gives birth in a hospital often comes back the next day a partner might go back to work the next week and that's it that that's her on her own and it's and it's very different to how it has been for 99% of our evolutionary history um where we became mothers among others um so yeah a bit like lessons and then like one of the one of the biggest segments in my book is looking at the newest ground-breaking, amazing neuroscience, which tells us how significant the changes are to the brain in pregnancy and childbirth and motherhood.

And also how much plasticity there is in the caregiver brain. We're all born with the neural circuitry to look after infants you know we know that father brains change shape um and with hands on care you know brains brains are malleable and you know it it's a it's a big thing. But then with that plasticity comes vulnerability. So we all know that adolescents in their transition are vulnerable and are kind of wide open to influence and positives and negatives and need a little bit of care, you know. But in matricence, we don't quite yet have that understanding.

And also, women have also given birth. They've been through something incredibly physical. However you give birth, it's an enormous trauma on the body. And yet, we're kind of expected to breeze into this new life stage. So, sorry, that was a really long definition. And I'm sure you were down to that. How would you add to that? I mean, I think it's very open I think that was said so beautifully I don't know if I would have more to

add just that I think it does change you politically even too and socially in the way your friendships move and change just like in that adolescent phase where you're trying on different identities that's that sense of a real shift in how you see yourself and then how others see you and you're right I think in our culture there's this strange feeling I got this strange feeling that I'd lost my name sometimes even like people on the street would call me mummy or mum rather than my name. And I really, really struggled with that. And this kind of realization that, oh, what I think about a good mother is that they are so self-sacrificing. They never think of themselves. And I want to be like that. And that's how I should be, except I'm still Claire. I'm still this person who's a creatively driven brain that needs to be doing things and constantly stimulated in a position where I used to be part of a big fabric and

community and have this identity in the job I loved where people would come to me as an expert and now I I don't feel like an expert in mothering and I'm suddenly I'm isolated and yeah and and what I love about your approach to is I remember you saying to me when we did a show together in Basingstoke that it'd be great if everyone could just check in and be like how's your matricence going because for some people they they really do thrive in it in a lot of ways and and find a new identity that actually really fits them or, you know, I think it's such a spectrum, that whole transition. And I wanted to say too I'm so sorry for your experience as well. I think the trauma of birth is something we both share

and then the impact of that going through your matrescence in that way. I've started to work with a lot of women who care for women in birth, doulas and midwives, and just listening to the way they talk about birth and the options that are available to you that I didn't know about either. And not necessarily that that would have changed how violent I found it and how much pain I was in, but maybe it would have made me feel like I was more in control of the choices that were happening to me rather than at the mercy of the system. Yeah, it's just so complex. And there's a little phrase that you use that I thought was so radical in your book.

I had never realized in birth that I knew my cervix had to dilate to what is it like 10 centimeters or something but I didn't have any visual representation of even what that was supposed to be and I love how you create this picture and the phrase this is how big it needs to be is in the shape of the cervix open and it was so revolutionary to me have people responded to you about that page? Yeah, they have actually. That was one of the, I have to say I enjoyed doing that. It felt like there was quite a few other examples like that of like playing with the text. And I think what I was trying to do was to, you know, there was almost no words for the experience of feeling of giving birth so I think our we have

like no lexicon or adequate lexicon for the different way things that can happen in birth the different pains in the the experience of a service being dilated and feeling like just very weirdly open and so what I wanted to do with that page was and I felt all I could do was use the words like paint or you know shatter the text and and use it in a visual way because you know words kind of failed me and I have had I have had people have picked up on that and I did you know it's one of the threads in the book and in my own matricence of like I don't think I would have had the confidence to do something like formally playful like that before having children like I like that page for example was probably

done when my daughter was like two or three and I write about this later in the book but it it was very inspiring for me to to see a tiny human and how like intrinsic it is for a little human animal to create and to make and to draw without any sense of like result or achievement or validation from anyone else and I found that really really incredible to watch and I found it quite you know what I started to draw myself I started to play music again I mean I know that you I mean this must maybe you relate to this too but this kind of like, almost like an escape hatch out of culture that I felt I was in, which was like, unless you're doing something for money

or you're doing something and you're going to be really good at it, like, what's the point in wasting your time? Instead, I connected to that part of me of creating just for the sake of it, you know? And so that is a like like there's a stylistic thread through through the text which I enjoyed yeah and I guess that's the example isn't it that as in most transitions like at the moment I'm really fascinated by dragonflies and how they

transition by drilling a hole in their own head and through a cosmic thing with water and kind of frantic heat or something they have to explode out of their own grub kind of body and unfurl as these like incredible predator amazing agile machines that can move and change everywhere with the water and i've been thinking a lot about that you know that it takes time for that it takes seven to eight hours i watched it on youtube and so fascinating have you done that are they are they the guys do they start life in the water so they have like the larval stages they're aquatic and then they become airborne flying insects is that right they have this whole whole first act of their life when they're swimming about. Yeah, they're kind of grub-like.

I know they're sort of almost under rocks and they're kind of these flat, grey, grub-like kind of water creatures with these funny little feet. I'm doing this thing with my hands, but it's the audio. But anyway, and yeah, and then they do, they kind of burst out and it's apparently incredibly painful process and that is to me this sort of feeling i had through this matrescence that because from my understanding it's seven to eight years but to really kind of move through that after you give birth but it is this sort of freeing feeling too i'm like, well, I've done that now. I've been through that.

Yeah, there's no rules anymore or you see the matrix or something and want to exist a bit outside it. So there is this kind of wonderful burst of creativity that kind of comes forth. And, yeah, just the idea that art doesn't have to be about being good or being perfect or a commodity commodity that it's a way of being in the world which kids teach you over and over again and I'm still learning to detach that feeling of having to have made something that is essentially only worthwhile if it's going to make

you a lot of money or you know know, or be the best thing. And I think music is essentially one of those things. I know you spoke to me about you hadn't listened to a lot of music for a while, particularly after giving birth. Yeah, do you listen to more now? I still haven't returned to music in the same way. I mean, like before I had kids, music was like my life. It always had been. Like I was like, you know, I played music as a had kids music was like my life it always had been like I was like

you know I played music as a kid that was like my thing and I worked at a music magazine gracious for music constantly listening to it and then it was weird it was almost like a part of my brain was being used for something else until I heard your album. I think there's something about the lack of, like, maternal subjectivity in music. Like, it's quite hard to find. Like, I felt, like, so alien to, like, the music I was listening to. I just couldn't, you know, I couldn't relate to it. There was nothing in it that felt like it was speaking to me.

And that was one of, like, why I just, I love your album so much. And I'm really hungry for that. You know, I think I'm seeing it more, like, there are more, like, mothers making music. I listen to classical. I listen to a lot of kids' music. I'm listening to a lot of Herbie Hancock. I listen to a lot of jazz, actually. I find jazz to be when everyone

is screaming and the house is in chaos and like i'm being pulled this way and that and i need to get the fish fingers out the oven and you know it's just i'm covered in like snot and banana i put on a little bit of jazz like herbie Hancock it just I love it it just it's so different to the like domestic chaos um and it transports me in a way and I find it also jazz it kind of mirrors and speaks to the like experimental improvisation of mothering and caregiving like it's just kind of out there but i guess in a way it's similar to what we're saying about like the these like these like stories in the natural world like i found that like my cultural diet or the you know the culture i was consuming just didn't have anything about

metamorphosis in it or uh change and process it seemed to me that my culture was like wanting me to stay the same basically to be like a young youthful blah blah blah you know bounce back like hide any sign of having given birth or having children get back into work and just be the same as you were and and that's why I had to look to the wider world around me and to you know sea squirts and slime molds and like you say dragonflies and and maybe both like love moths and cuckoos and chrysalises and you know to see that actually change and process and transition is like the most natural thing in the world. And if you look around you, it's everywhere, and that's quite grounding.

So, yeah, jazz and cocoons. The two of my favourite things. It's so funny you say jazz because I had never listened to jazz. My relationship with music is quite funny because when I was studying, I studied music and voice, but I did classical and I found it was so full of perfection and telling you that if you didn't get that note exactly right or if you're a bit pitchy or a bit off then the whole piece wasn't great and you know I'd have to stand up and sing or play and then the group would critique you and it was this very kind of hyper competitive almost quite patriarchal way of you know classical music is either you're going to be a professional

or not and there wasn't sort of room within that world for just the collaborative joy of it so much and maybe it was part of my own sensitivity I just never felt I was good enough and so I shied away music to me is kind of the rhythm of things it's everything it sits very deeply inside me and I was so afraid of that part of me because I loved it so much so I didn't go and see love music I didn't listen to music for like 15 years really much other than you know here and there and but not nothing major and if I did go and see love music I'd often weep which happened to me just then I just started crying when you took the chat just is so deeply inside the where my being I think

and I hid away from it and then when I got really sick with long COVID and after I'd had my daughter in the pandemic it was like my body couldn't do anything else other than parent and rest and I just was so I had run from myself for so long and was such a broken person in a lot of ways so the trauma of it all and feeling like I'd failed at mothering and everything because I couldn't do it the way that I thought I was supposed to. And, you know, so music came back to me and songwriting because songs have always followed me around since I was a kid and I just spent a lot of time ignoring them.

You know, I'd get drunk and then hide in a cubicle and write songs into my phone and I thought other people did that, but it turns out not everyone does that and so it really yeah I mean when I when I finally after having two kids and finding music again I was really hadn't listened to any jazz really at all and I found jazz yeah after I released my album and and I, I now put it on all the time because there's something about the chaos, the intricacy of it, the like very delicate sounds that you can find in it. I never used to understand it when I was younger.

I always thought it was too chaotic for me and now I've found there's so many different forms of it and that music without words, maybe, yeah, you're right because there isn't as much music that really puts around that idea of metamorphosis that felt resonant for me um Lucy Rose I don't know if you know her she's a UK singer-songwriter artist releasing her new album have you listened to that no I will go oh so she's just released new music and I've loved I do love her music anyway but she actually had um hopefully I'm gonna get it right maternal wasn't it might have been osteoporosis so she she was a new touring musician before she had her baby and then when she became pregnant she could barely brush her teeth there's an article in the guardian that came out just recently about it and she's since released

three new songs from this album that's coming out or may just be out where she writes about her experience of mothering but it's in this beautiful way that isn't twee it's not that at all it's very much about it i just resonated with it so deeply and because it's got a jazz bass to it she's a pianist as well so it's very rhythmic and she performed at a jazz club in London recently and it's it's great because it feels radical in that same way you know and she sort of writes oh you'll love her and she's wonderful to follow but also i think there's a lyric in there about i'm going to butcher it now but it's something about how can this be a miracle and a disaster at the same time which feels very true the paradox and do you know um

you know bat for lashes you know natasha's music? Oh, she's really great. And she has a new album coming out. I think it's called I Dream of Delphi. And the way she's described it is very much about her matrescence. There's also a song by Brandy Carlisle that someone sent me. Have you heard of the Brandy Carlisle mother song? I'll send it to you. I'll send it to you separately.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I'll send it to you. I'll send it to you separately. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I would love that. And are you writing music? I am, yeah. I'm releasing it. It's an ambient track, actually, which I've never done before. It's a collaboration on the 7th of April with Willa Brandt,

who's an ambient artist. And, yeah, it's just an experiment. I'm just experimenting with what you were saying with your cervix page and the way you play with words. And there's something about the – there's just a simple phrase in it, which I think was so wild to me because I think I wrote that song before I finished reading your book. I wrote it like early last year that there's a lyric the lyric in it is

to breathe to love to seek to love to breathe is a phrase that repeats in it and then I when I read the last page of your book and you finish on that beautiful passage about relationship to all things and then you finish with and we sit lit by a tender light and we breathe something like that yeah just gave me goosebumps all over I really was just like oh that's so interesting I can't wait to hear it it sounds great oh thank you I will see it's always the way when you put any offering in the world you never know what it's going to be like but i'm trying to as we discussed separate from that idea of what you know the as it's it's a process in and of itself that's a joy that it exists and i like it so that's enough you know yeah it's all about process yeah it is all about process isn't it um i wanted to finish by asking you

about your relationship to trees tell us about that oh well i i think i just love trees more every day uh i probably ignored trees for most of my adolescence and early adulthood. And then in my late 20s, I had a kind of health issue and health crisis when I started to see trees again and started to see the world again for various reasons. And since that point, that's about 12 years, been in recovery for 12 years almost. And I need to be near trees I I love them which ones do I love that I mentioned I live next to an old cemetery it's got like some really old 14th century vibes going on and in the middle of it there's a beech tree and it's huge and it's stunning and it has this really massive trunk and I fed my children

under it I cried under it I've made little fairy houses with my kids under it and I go and I just hang out with it and I touch it and often get asked are you okay my passers-by but I I get I think I get strength from it I I take my thoughts and feelings and state of mind to it and I can't reprocess it myself and it's a really it's part of me now I am really lucky to have a little garden where we live and we have a willow tree, two apple trees, plum tree and my favourite place in the world, actually that's probably going a bit far, close to home, is we have a hammock in the garden. I lie in the hammock often with a small child and look up at the leaves and the trees and you know in these early years of matrescence and motherhood where there have been times where my nervous system has felt on the brink of you know burnout and there's a lot of

you know lots of noise and screaming and fun and tears and big feelings and you know I go out to the hammock and I just stare at the trees and I spent a number of years researching the connection between mental health and nature from my book Losing Eden my previous book which convinced me and it's kind of interesting that I think many of us need to convince them there are so many ways that just spending time with trees affects our bodies and our minds, from the phyton size, the chemicals released by the trees, to the fractal shapes of leaves and how the human eye is fractal. And when we look at fractals, it can reduce our stress

to the simple movement of a tree in the breeze and how farming that can lead to the nervous system to just spending time with ecosystems so we have lots of birds at the moment in the trees coming back blue tip long-tailed tip um grow likewise lots grow magpies lots of moss lots of lichen i the older i get the more i want to spend as much time as possible um like witnessing spring and the experience of being alive on the earth um it feels like a great pleasure both also really important for mental health also it's like being home oh i feel that so much i've started it's interesting i had a reading done by a woman who is a naturopath who lives in our community um and she said to me that you're going to spend a lot more time with trees and to just be curious about your path through that and the more I spend time I walk by the river and I wrote a lot of my songs doing

this kind of river walk that I used to just run a lot with headphones in and a lot you know not really totally absorbing it and now I have yeah friends that are trees that I go and sit with because they're so solid and and the scent of them is different at different times of day or noticing the little ladybugs that are on this sort of these big red river gums that we have or lemon scented gums and that the stillness that kind of comes when you are with them in that way yeah it feels deeply restorative and sitting just sitting and leaning against them and you're right I was doing that the other day in the park and just occurred to me how strange it is that no one else is doing it like I'm the only one and then we live in quite a densely

populated suburb of Melbourne there's people running so a couple people running or walking with their dogs but no one sits and maybe they do in their gardens but yeah it's a symptom of our our culture I guess and something I feel like I'm hoping we would all do more is that it just deeply feels like the right thing to be doing yeah I often think that I often think where is everyone why why is no one else doing this and it almost can sometimes feel even like like abject or like degenerate to be like just like hanging out with trees like I often feel quite self-conscious or like I have to kind of look like I'm actually doing something rather than just like hanging out with my friend for free.

But, you know, we're so free-blind and plant-blind. So for many years I just didn't see any of it, you know. Yeah, there's a beautiful First Nations kind of idea, our native people from Australia who have so much deep wisdom that we've kind of, oh, that's a whole other podcast, stolen and created a huge extraordinary amount of intergenerational trauma. But the wisdom within those peoples and communities around asking permission of plants

before you take anything from them and the reciprocal nature of living with plants and how they're living beings and not just sort of things we can rip out of the ground without thinking about you know the really deep care and love and knowledge that exists on our continent once we start to listen to it there's a wonderful woman who i'm doing a workshop with like going to be part of she walks you around her bush garden and talks about bush medicine and the properties of our native flora and fauna which for a lot of years in australia we just kind of bulldozed over and then big ag kind of grew all these crops that have never grown here before and so we have really

extraordinary soil that just isn't designed for growing European stuff and so she her Instagram is called dance of the plants and I'd so recommend you go and follow her she's just what she writes about and her relationship with them even I loved this she said if you're feeling unwell look into your garden the plants that are growing there naturally and see what they're trying to tell you about what you might need I thought that's so curious the older I get the more curious I am and the more I don't know is it being decolonized in your mindset or something or you know starting to feel like a lot of the narratives we've been taught about nature are just really productive I don't know hopefully we have so much to learn the red braiding

sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer no oh my my goodness, Claire, you are going to love it. You can listen to it and she reads it or just read it. So she is a biologist, a scientist, and also a member of the Otoyotomi Nation, First Nations in the States and she basically braids Indigenous wisdom with like incredible knowledge and love of plants and moss and there's like a maternal angle as well. I just know you're going to love it. Oh, thank you. I've got so many recommendations.

I'm definitely going to read that. I'm conscious that it's super late for you over there now because it's about nearly 9 30 here so um i just loved this conversation so much lucy thank you so much for coming on to thompson for sharing in your book so much and in louisiana as well but just in your work about your personal experiences of matricence but also all of this deep research and just your presence in the world and yeah just feel like you're a kindred spirit it's so strange isn't it because we live on opposite sides of the globe I really feel the same and it's such a pleasure to talk to you and you always say things

which make like blow my mind when you think in a different way and yeah it's it's lovely and thank you for like your time and spending time with the book and I just yeah I love this connection I can't wait to see you later in the year as well I know I'm so excited so Lucy's um being a part of the Matressence Festival that I'm um running with a wonderful producer Lizzie Hammer in the UK on the 21st and 22nd of June. Tickets aren't on sale yet. We're just sort of starting to piece together the lineup and everything. But I can't wait. I'm really looking forward to that.

We're doing a sound walk as part of that experience, walking outside. And, yeah, we're just trying to do it in a way that's a bit i like that word radical that you use you know different centering caregivers as participants and lizzie had this great idea of giving everyone headphones so wherever they are if they've got their little baby or need to be outside for whatever reason they can still hear what's going on um yeah yeah just trying to make it really accessible but I'll be doing um I'm coming to Dublin and I'm playing at Every Woman Festival in Wales um in Cardiff and then I'm there's a beautiful poet Lily Redwood who's releasing a book I love her I love her poem oh my god I'm so glad oh my god yeah I'm writing a forward for her pamphlet her poems are incredible

oh I'm so glad she told me what she was reaching out to you and I just thought you would love I like because actually so interesting with Lily we couldn't catch up last year but she just reached out to me and sent me these readings of her poems as audio and I've listened to the first one before I left to go to the UK and I just remember being just extraordinary like she writes about them as like as motherhood is like caterpillar soup and oh you're gorgeous and then but we couldn't catch up because she was running Butterfield um while I was there but she gave me all these recommendations for Abergavenny in her hometown so and I walked the Skirrid, which is this, like, big mountain just outside of Abergavenny.

Yeah, so I kind of followed her little recommendations through Abergavenny. So I felt her with me even though she wasn't there. And now we're doing a little event together in Abergavenny. She's got, there's, like, an artist studio there, a music community, and she puts on music events. So she's going to read her poems and I'm going to sing my songs and I'll probably end up on the floor in a puddle of tears.

I'm going to try and come. That sounds amazing. Oh, my God. I would love you to come. Yeah, the idea, the title of her book is so cool too about the swift bird. You remind me of a swift. Yeah, you make me think of swift. Yeah, that's it.

Yeah, your listeners need to check her out. She is the real deal. Oh, I'm so glad you've connected with her too. Oh, yeah, it's, you know, mycelium networks, interconnected webs all over the place. It's the way it's, you know, mycelium networks, interconnected webs all over the place. It's a wave. It's a wave happening. Yeah, it's beautiful.

All right, well, I better go find my kids. We're at the beach. Yeah, we've come down. We took my son out of school and my brother's here from Norway, so we're going to go. My husband's taking them to the beach so I'm about to go swim in the ocean now which is very exciting have a lovely swim and thank you it's always so lovely to talk to you oh I agree um yes sending

you lots of love thank you so much Lucy and we'll be in touch soon and I'll see you in June yeah definitely can't wait lots Lots of love. You too. You've been listening to a podcast with me, Claire Tonti, and this week with the wonderful author, Lucy Jones. For more from Lucy, head over to her Instagram account at Lucy F. Jones, where you can find links to all of her work, her upcoming speaking events. And I would totally recommend going to check out both this book, Matrescence. The audio version is definitely available here in Australia, if that's where you're based. And also Losing Eden is an extraordinary work too. For more from me, you can head to

claretonte.com with links to all of my events, including my tour of the UK and Ireland coming up later in the year and more updates about the Matrescence Festival, which will be out sort of towards the end of April for tickets. So they're not available yet. Every Woman Festival in Cardiff definitely is though. And I can't wait to go back over to visit everyone over there. I had such a special time last year. To listen to my song, To Breathe, I would love you to head over to Spotify. You can also find it on Apple Music and head to ambient artist Willa Brandt, who collaborated on this track with me. His work is also really, really extraordinary to listen to. So he's over there on Spotify.

I'd recommend The Stillness of Now. All right. So that's my track To Breathe. I'd love to hear from you. So either DM me at Claire Tonti on Instagram, or you can also email the show hello at clairetonti.com with suggestions for guests or feedback or stories. I always love to hear from people who listen to the show. And as always, thank you to Raw Collings for editing this week's episode and to Maisie for running our social media.

All right, go gently. Remember to breathe. Drop those shoulders. Spend some time with some trees and I'll see you next week. Bye.