How can this be, Lucy Jones asks, when it is “a transition that involves a whole spectrum of emotional and existential ruptures”?

This book should be given to every mother going through matresence, to every midwife, health visitor, doctor and anyone who is interested in how we make the world a bit more equal. Almost three years into my own matrescence, this book is the single most powerful, life-changing, heartachingly healing thing I have been given.Feminism owes a great debt to the women who smell smoke, and societal assumptions about unmedicated birth, breastfeeding, and intensive mothering continue to harm women’s mental and physical health daily. 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. Motherhood has immense physical and emotional ramifications, and it is appalling that it does not get discussed as much as it should be. Around halfway through the book, I kept thinking, ‘please give me the good side that makes this all worth it.

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 radical new examination of the transition into motherhood and how it affects the mind, brain and body. I would advise against reading it during pregnancy if you're someone who prefers to focus on the positive side of things.I appreciated the laser focus on her own physical and emotional development, but the statistical and theoretical context gives a sense of the universal. It is] wide-ranging in its scope, packed with statistics about mental health, new studies on the rewiring of women's brains after childbirth and the presence of foetal cells in our bodies . 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.