Dr Rosalind Watts Speaks with Lucy Jones

What a joy to talk with Lucy Jones, an author of culture, science and na­ture writings featured on BBC Earth, The Sunday Times, The Guardian and the New Statesman. Her latest book, Matrescence, is about how the process of becoming a mother is often under-supported and under-recognised in our society, how it can bring shocking awareness of the disconnectedness of our culture, and how it can point us in the direction of what we need to bring forth for the next generation: mycelial networks of care and co-operation. In this warm, raw, and wonderful woodland walk, we talk about the parallels between childbirth and psychedelic experiences, and the ways our culture under-prepares us for both.
This conversation was so perfect for Douglas Fir month, when we learn from the forest about the networks of reciprocity and care that connect the trees together. In particular, we learn about the Mother Trees: wise, generous veteran trees who act as linchpins for the whole forest. The Douglas Fir tree reminds us how important it is to create networks of care that we all desperately need and few of us have grown in.
Lucy describes how the nuclear family often offers very scant support for parents, and puts a lot of pressure on just a few exhausted people to keep a whole household going, and explains that for 95% of our evolutionary history, humans engaged in collective child rearing networks. In some traditional cultures, a baby will be responded to by 10-20 ‘alloparents’ a day so the mother can rest! Yet in modern capitalist society, our networks of care have been eroded, and we try to struggle on and cope because we feel shame if we don’t. Lucy talks how, pre-parenthood, she had been ‘marinated in ideas of autonomy and self-sufficiency’ and how ‘having a child broke that fiction’. She says that becoming a mother was an ecological awakening for her, and how although the NASA definition of life is that it is ‘a self-sustaining system’ she realised that this is wrong, because actually life is sustained by interconnection, a system sustained by environment, the matrix within which every organism thrives or withers.
Lucy talks about her own long (and psychedelic) labour: how challenging it was, and how abandoned she felt by a culture that told her that ’birth wasn’t really a big deal’. Lucy suffered from post-natal depression, and once again felt let down by the often isolated institution of western motherhood, where the baby is centred and the mother is sometimes seen as merely a ‘feeding machine’. We talk about our culture’s denial of the female body generally, the shame and silencing new mothers can feel, and the power of connection and honest sharing to melt that shame away. Lucy’s idea of ‘Matroreform’ is exciting- she shares many ways we can bring back connectedness, and re-stitch the fabric of care that we all need, whether we are parents to children, each other, animals, plants, or that more connected world that’s slowly gestating.
Find about more about Lucy at her website lucyfjones.com... to Lucy talking more about Matrescence • Matrescence: Author Lu...

[@suzansadie8185]

Good to hear a woman talking in this way! The process of becoming a mother is utterly neglected in this western world. Giving birth and becoming such was the biggest life changing experience I have ever been through. Although my birth was completely natural and in a friend's house miles from anywhere down a dirt tract, at one point I felt i was going to die and was struggling with this until a voice came through me saying "So die then!" As the universe came through my legs - at least that's how I now describe it - life at that time was becoming a doorway into a completely new and oh so utterly different world.
Unlike you I was advised that i would know nothing about what was happening in me during labour and it would be painful and that i'd need to rely on the 'experts'. This could not have been further from the truth because of issues that i don't need to go into here.
I experienced post partum depression but all that the people around me - family, friends and others, did was to say life was no longer about me. Like yourselves I and my needs and difficulties were just brushed aside as me being selfish. It was such a harsh and humiliating time which in turn adversely affected my relationship with my child.
Previous to motherhood i spent a mass of time working with traditional healers and shaman in East Africa. One thing I remember so clearly happened within one of the communities I lived with. This was that during the first moon of a baby's life, that baby is never put down and as well the mother does absolutely nothing but take life gently as others in her community do everything necessary for her. She doesn't cook, or clean, or fetch water, or wash clothes or work in the shamba. As well as holding the baby, if need be a 'wet sister' wld even feed her child. She undertakes none of her usual commitments. Indeed the mother is revered and respected becasue traditional societies in their unmatched sophistication, understand the import that mothers attain and hold within their community. They recognise that a child is the responsibility of everyone in the community. When we observe what happens in the west with the nuclear family and desperate lack of any real community, it's little wonder that things so often fall apart - there is that conspiracy of silence which means this is never talked about. The west has so much to learn. Kindness and Love to you both as we keep on, Suzan (SuzYaki Hacati on farcebook.)