Matrescence, the best book I’ve ever read about motherhood, is a delightfully unusual one. For starters, brief passages that lay out the machinations of nature, and many of its horrors, sit around its chapters. We meet eels that endure five life stages and multiple habitats before breeding once and then dying, and black lace-weaver mother spiders who feed their living bodies to their infants.
“Forty spiderlings, which resemble creamy yellow sea pearls, wander over her nonchalantly, devouring, snacking, nibbling, pulling bits of her flesh into their tiny mouths,” Jones writes, watching a grisly nature video. Spotting a similar spider in her children’s toy box not long after, she’s relieved to find no babies. The whole experience has felt “close to home”. “She’s safe,” she writes. “For now.”
By exploring matrescence — the physical, physiological and psychological process of becoming a mother — within this wider context of the natural world, Jones recalibrates ideas of how women are meant to exist and behave during these fast-changing years. The book’s title comes from a 1973 essay by medical anthropologist Dana Raphael, lamenting the lack of acknowledgment of “mother-becoming” in western societies. She discusses a ritual in the Pacific island of Tikopia that marks the fact that a woman has given birth, and prioritizes “the sense of the newborn mother,” rather than erasing her entirely around her child. This shift of focus captivates Jones, a new mother at the start of the book, who has a daughter and two sons by its conclusion.
As in her previous book, 2020’s Losing Eden (an examination of our disconnection from nature), Jones’s writing is hungry to impart knowledge. Moving from the early stages of her pregnancy to her eldest child’s first day at school, she describes how the mother’s brain literally changes shape, retaining extra gray matter for years, processing more information, emotion and memory. She challenges the ideal of the nuclear family raising children in western societies, when babies are raised by networks of “othermothers” across the world, and in the animal kingdom, including in colonies of bats.
Myths are also smashed from page one, which makes this a thrilling read. A sperm doesn’t race to an egg, for example.
“This is a retelling of the hero myth, essentially, with the egg as the passive vessel,” Jones writes, in one of many withering lines.
In fact, cells from the fallopian tube are required to secrete chemicals that allow the sperm to swim and mature, then the egg must enfold it. Women are reframed as active throughout, which empowers.
Jones is great on the impossible rules, and the lack of correct information meted out to pregnant women. (How on earth are they meant to avoid car fumes without staying indoors? Why is morning sickness still called that by the NHS, when studies have proved it’s an all-day rush to the sick bucket for the many who get it?) Passages that reveal what many advocates of “intensive mothering” miss out on are also revealing. The pioneer of attachment theory, John Bowlby, did indeed underline the importance of the proximity of a child to a caregiver in terms of their emotional development, but he also said that parents are equally “dependent on a greater society for economic provision”, and that society should “cherish” its parents. Look at the childcare and parental leave situation in modern Britain and weep.
Especially good is her analysis of the modern obsession with “sacrificing birth”, tracking back to the (amazingly named) British obstetrician Grant Dickly-Read, who saw the vaginal delivery as the “ultimate phenomenon of a series of spiritual experiences”. Jones understands women wanting “to feel their bodies are powerful rather than degenerate, for facing danger and risk head-on”, but this won’t stop her from reminding us how nature is not always kind.
But Jones never wags her finger or chastises. Experimental flourishes in her text — alongside all that beautiful, accessible writing — also add to its majesty. On one page, the phrase “This is how big it needs be” is repeated in a formation that reveals the size of a cervix in its center. How I howled. Matrescence is essential reading, bloody and alive, roaring and ready to change conversations.
Nov. 11 to Nov. 17 People may call Taipei a “living hell for pedestrians,” but back in the 1960s and 1970s, citizens were even discouraged from crossing major roads on foot. And there weren’t crosswalks or pedestrian signals at busy intersections. A 1978 editorial in the China Times (中國時報) reflected the government’s car-centric attitude: “Pedestrians too often risk their lives to compete with vehicles over road use instead of using an overpass. If they get hit by a car, who can they blame?” Taipei’s car traffic was growing exponentially during the 1960s, and along with it the frequency of accidents. The policy
Hourglass-shaped sex toys casually glide along a conveyor belt through an airy new store in Tokyo, the latest attempt by Japanese manufacturer Tenga to sell adult products without the shame that is often attached. At first glance it’s not even obvious that the sleek, colorful products on display are Japan’s favorite sex toys for men, but the store has drawn a stream of couples and tourists since opening this year. “Its openness surprised me,” said customer Masafumi Kawasaki, 45, “and made me a bit embarrassed that I’d had a ‘naughty’ image” of the company. I might have thought this was some kind
What first caught my eye when I entered the 921 Earthquake Museum was a yellow band running at an angle across the floor toward a pile of exposed soil. This marks the line where, in the early morning hours of Sept. 21, 1999, a massive magnitude 7.3 earthquake raised the earth over two meters along one side of the Chelungpu Fault (車籠埔斷層). The museum’s first gallery, named after this fault, takes visitors on a journey along its length, from the spot right in front of them, where the uplift is visible in the exposed soil, all the way to the farthest
The room glows vibrant pink, the floor flooded with hundreds of tiny pink marbles. As I approach the two chairs and a plush baroque sofa of matching fuchsia, what at first appears to be a scene of domestic bliss reveals itself to be anything but as gnarled metal nails and sharp spikes protrude from the cushions. An eerie cutout of a woman recoils into the armrest. This mixed-media installation captures generations of female anguish in Yun Suknam’s native South Korea, reflecting her observations and lived experience of the subjugated and serviceable housewife. The marbles are the mother’s sweat and tears,