Matrescence: The Transition to Mother
“The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. A mother is something absolutely new.”
This blog post is the second in a six-part series I’ll be doing that traces my personal journey through the MotherBLOOM program. To learn more about MotherBLOOM, click here.
When I was pregnant with my first child, I spent hours and hours diligently planning out the perfect birth. Of course, that is not at all how it happened; after a long and unproductive labor, I ended up with an emergency cesarean section. Wallowing in disappointment over the loss of the birth experience I had wished for would have to wait; I had a new baby to attend to. And it was on the drive home from the hospital, when my son began to cry and I had no idea what to do, that I had the blinding realization, “I should have spent those hours planning out motherhood, not birth. I have no idea how to be a mother.”
There is a name for the transition into motherhood called “matrescence.” The best explanation I’ve heard about this period comes from Dr. Aurélie Athan on her website, www.matrescence.com:
The process of becoming a mother, coined by Dana Raphael, Ph.D. (1973), is a developmental passage where a woman transitions through pre-conception, pregnancy and birth, surrogacy or adoption, to the postnatal period and beyond. The exact length of matrescence is individual, recurs with each child, and may arguably last a lifetime! The scope of the changes encompass multiple domains --bio-psycho-social-political-spiritual-- and can be likened to the developmental push of adolescence. Increased attention to mothers has spurred new findings, from neuroscience to economics, and supports the rationale for a new field of study known as matrescence. Such an arena would allow the roundtable of specialists to come together and advance our understanding of this life passage.
We are not given the space to celebrate our transition to motherhood. Our modern society does not offer any commemoration or ritual around birth that honors the mother; the closest thing we have is the baby shower. The cesarean birth rate in the U.S. is over 30%, while the home birth rate hovers around 1%. Birth is no longer the honored initiation from Maiden to Mother; instead it’s a medicalized event where we give our feminine power over to the hands of a male-led industry. Even birthdays aren’t about the Mother’s experience of birth; it’s just another child-focused party and reason to buy more things!
Holding space for birth stories is an incredibly important part of the transition into motherhood. I offer the birth stories of my three children here, both for my own healing and because it’s important we tell these stories. Sharing the difficulties I had with my births is in no way meant to offer an ideal of what birth should or should not be, it is merely one person’s story. I also want to take a moment to acknowledge the privileges I hold in regard to each of these births; as an educated, upper middle class, white, cishetero woman in a monogamous marriage to the father of my children, the journey to my birth experience was certainly smoother and paved with less difficulties than many others. I will do future blog posts highlighting many different voices and birth stories of people who may consider themselves on the margins to ensure that a clearer picture of how difficult birth in the United States is for many people.
I’d spent my life hearing my cesarean birth story but was determined to have a natural childbirth so I went to a local midwifery group - they delivered in a hospital but promised an experience that would be as natural as possible. There were no birthing centers at the time in Phoenix, and I was too scared to birth at home so I felt like this was my best option. I loved meeting with my midwives, but as I got into my last few months of pregnancy, I started to be concerned. There were signs that this was going to be a much more medicalized event than I had wanted.
Max’s Birth Story
My “due date” was October 14th. At about 34 weeks pregnant, I started having some cramps that to me felt like early labor pains. I was put on bed rest for two weeks...nothing further came of it. At my 40 week appointment, my midwife seemed confident that I’d be going into labor soon...when I saw her a week later at 41 weeks, she stated that if I were still pregnant at 42 weeks, I’d be induced. I wanted my Mom (link to motherline) to be there with me for the birth, but it was stressful trying to figure out when to have her come. She needed to fly from Utah to Arizona, which is a short flight, but still requires a little bit of advance notice. My midwife said I should go ahead and have her come, that she was sure I’d be going into labor any day.
My mom flew down to Arizona the next day. We spent an entire week together, puttering around the house, running errands, joking about how my baby was going to wait until my birthday on October 30 to be born. But underneath it all was a stressful current of thought: my mom had taken two weeks off to help me with my newborn. Every day I didn’t have a baby was a day “wasted.” In hindsight, this pressure was certainly unhelpful.
On October 29, when I was 42 weeks pregnant, I went in to be induced with the Foley bulb. I spent the night at home with contractions. My mom and my husband Sam came in to check on me occasionally, but I kept sending them back to bed. At 2:00 am my mom came in to whisper “Happy Birthday” to me and I started to cry because it hurt so much.
We eventually made it back to the hospital. After twenty-four hours of labor, my cervix had still not dilated to the proper 10 cm and my baby’s heartrate was dropping dramatically. I was wheeled into the operating room for an emergency c-section. My son, Max, was born October 30, 2009, on my 28th birthday.
There is so much hindsight with this birth. I wish I had done the work to examine how my mother’s and grandmother’s birth stories affected the way I thought about birth. My mother was a labor and delivery nurse for most of my childhood, and I grew up hearing how painful labor is, that “epidurals were God’s gift to women,” that no one had an unmedicated birth at home. I was one of the first of my friends to have a baby, and no one even entertained the thought of a home birth. My childbirth education was a joke, a two hour class with a dozen other couples as my husband and I tried not to giggle when I was supposed to practice exhaling loudly.
The cruelest moment of my delivery experience was shortly after Max was born. The nurse on staff whisked him away to do the eye drops and all the newborn care, and my husband went with them. I was left alone on the operating table (my mom had not been allowed into the O.R., she was back in the laboring room.) I was shaking because of the medication and surgery, so they gently strapped my hands down. I was still covered with a blue sheet; I don’t even think the doctor or my midwife, who was assisting, could see my face. They were chatting casually about a baseball game, and then switched topics to a date the doctor had recently been on. I was invisible, just a body they were stitching up. No one stood by me, no one asked how I was doing, I was simply left strapped to a metal table. There was no celebration of what I’d just gone through, no acknowledgment of my inevitable disappointment in the way my birth had gone. My son is almost 12 now, and yet I can still remember how crushingly isolated I felt after his birth, how starved I was for a motherly figure to tell me I had done a good job.
Milo’s Birth Story
When I got pregnant again a few years later, I was even more determined to have a vaginal delivery. I did ALL THE THINGS this time - attended a VBAC focused class, received massages and acupuncture, practiced and taught prenatal yoga, ate the right foods, got the right exercise, hired a doula who did cranial sacral and energy work with me, attended ICAN classes to hear VBAC success stories and so much more. This time I went into labor naturally, which was a very healing experience for me. I hadn’t realized how much fear and doubt I’d been carrying about my ability to birth a baby based on how my first experience had gone. But after another twenty four hours of labor, this time pushing for the last two hours, the decision was made to do another c-section. My son, Milo Samuel Fishleder, was born November 18, 2012.
Milo’s birth experience was still better than Max’s had been. My wonderful, peaceful, maternal doula Pam was able to stay with me in the operating room while Sam left with our newborn. She stroked the hair away from my face, and kept telling me how proud she was of me, how strong I was, and how beautiful my baby boy was. Even now, I have tears in my eyes as I type this, remembering how she cared for me.
Daisy’s Birth Story
When I was pregnant for the third time, I had no interest in going through the experience of labor then emergency cesarean again. I was a mother to two active boys, and I was also back to work in the corporate world. I scheduled my third and final c-section and it was by far my easiest birth. My daughter, Daisy Lucile Fishleder, was born on May 6, 2015. I’d had a full night of sleep, and because it wasn’t an emergency, the doctor was able to make a slow, careful incision that left a minimal scar. By this time, they were keeping newborns in the operating room, so I was able to hear her cries and laugh with my husband while I was being stitched up.
I have three delightful, bright, funny children. I often hear birth stories dismissed as only one day in the entire life of a child. I honor those mothers who need to minimize their birth experiences, and I also recognize that for many, birth is a profoundly life-altering experience. The shift in psyche that is required for the transition from Maiden to Mother is life-altering and ego-shattering. There is huge potential in the power of birth as a spiritual experience, and I hope to bring awareness to this in future posts.