The Matrescence Will Be Cringe
Submissive and Breedable #3
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In my first trimester, well-meaning friends would ask if I had any “weird cravings” yet. The reality was wanting food at all was the outlier. So the only answer I had to this was to describe the week when I woke up one day and needed desperately, in a pickles-and-ice-cream-coded way, to listen exclusively to Death Cab For Cutie. ‘Soul Meets Body’ got me out of bed and into the kitchen to make my white bread toast. ‘Transatlanticism’ accompanied me on my weird bathroom trips. We made the completely insane decision to get on an airplane during week 9, and I just listened to the album ‘Plans’ in its entirety on loop while white-knuckling my armrests, not even moving when the guy next to me spilled a completely-full cup of water in my lap.
There was another entire week where I watched at least 3 nineties Disney movies a day. Prestige TV was sickening to me; all I wanted were familiar narratives punctuated by morality songs. I cried a little to the Lion King, related a little too hard to Quasimodo’s cloistered life in the bell tower. I am deformed… and I am ugly…
My texts to friends throughout the pregnancy have been surprisingly free of irony and humor; I don’t hesitate to tell people I love them or that I’m excited to see them. I’ll do it to their faces too, I don’t give a shit.
I recognize in all of this something elemental about what moms are snarkily derided for: LIVE LAUGH LOVE signs, nostalgic jeans, embarrassing old music. As my system is absolutely throttled with progesterone and my bodily needs become secondary to those of my fetus, beauty is suddenly very accessible, kind of bottom-shelf. I’m dazzled and charmed by things that only someone rolling on molly would admit to being dazzled by: I stream tears at Instagram Reels of babies laughing. Random acts of kindness from strangers bring me to my knees (not literally, I’m not fucking around with my knees with all this relaxin in my system). A Nickel Creek song I haven’t heard in years is suddenly a love song between me and my baby:
I only feel comfortable sharing this with other moms, because they chime in with their own earnest reflections on the Huge Feelings. A mother of two that I love tells me she’s been working on a poem about the grief of motherhood, its inherent loss. She shares Brandi Carlile’s ‘The Mother’ with me:
Welcome to the end of being alone inside your mind
You're tethered to another and you're worried all the time
You always knew the melody but you never heard it rhyme
She's fair and she is quiet, Lord, she doesn't look like me
She made me love the morning, she's a holiday at sea
The New York streets are as busy as they always used to be
But I am the mother of Evangeline
I’d never heard the word ‘matrescence’ until I got pregnant and my algorithms clocked me within days. If you’re unfamiliar, it refers to the process of becoming a mother, riffing on ‘adolescence.’ It’s a good comparison: the matrescence is also a hormone-soaked tunnel (vaginal canal?) you squeeze through after which you’re never the same. Before getting pregnant I feared this change, worried the important parts of myself might fall away. They may still. But ever since I spent my first trimester repeatedly doubled over on the floor, simultaneously projectile vomiting and pissing down my legs, losing the more ephemeral parts of my personality quickly fell down my list of worries. ‘Is the baby ok?’ was number one, but even that one didn’t trouble me since my OB informed me ‘the worse you feel, the better baby is doing.’
It struck me once I entered the second trimester and started to feel better that pregnancy is not a healing process. Every time in my life that I’ve felt shitty, it’s been due to illness or injury. And I could reliably expect a time-table of recovery: be it a few days for a bout of food poisoning, or a few years for my chronic pelvic floor pain. In the case of the latter, there were things I could do to address it. Pain = treatable. But when I was doubled over on the bathroom floor on New Year’s Eve, sobbing to my husband about how I didn’t have what it took to keep doing this, the only way forward was into more unknown, more exhaustion, more marathon of shit.
So if it’s not healing, it has to be becoming. Un-becoming. Witnessing this whole thing that’s going on inside me with no help from my thinking mind.
I spent about two weeks, and will maybe spend the rest of my life, fucking pissed about religion. The way it went in my head was you think a MAN, whose body CANNOT DO THIS1 is GOD?!?!? Are you fuckin’ STUPID?!?! My algorithms show me video after video representing the maternal instinct as a prowling grizzly bear, her fur rippling with lethal portent, as a blood-tongued lioness protecting her cubs from their own father, as a blue whale breeching with a staggering crash before returning to feeding her pup. As this alchemical process transforms every part of my body, I feel not a crucifixion of an old self but rather a composting of parts of me to create something regenerative. I think the resurgence of these nostalgic pieces is just part of turning the compost, embracing the rot, knowing fertility thrives in dark places.
Ultimately, the matrescence is losing a little bit of your cool in order to become a God. I’ll wear whatever jeans I need to so I can awaken that part of me, and good luck to anyone who gets in my way.
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Obviously trans men can have babies but I think in the Christian worldview they’re not factoring this in. If Jesus was trans we’d be having a different discussion - I'd even be on board.
I think most of the world's problems exist because men have womb envy. We are the makers of life! No man is more powerful than a woman
Amen!