The Transition to Motherhood: Pregnancy

This is the 5th post in a series.

In her book, Matresence, Lucy Jones says that pregnancy is a metamorphosis. She compares the woman's identity and her mind to a caterpillar that becomes a butterfly. During pregnancy, she says, the woman's previous identity must melt away in order for her new identity and concept of self to emerge.

And during her own first pregnancy, Jones found this process very disturbing. She says, unlike other stages of life for which there are parties and ceremonies to mark the transition of one stage of life to another, during pregnancy, for which there are no ceremonies in our culture which celebrate the mother, the woman can feel profoundly awkward and alone.

Jones talks about how, during adolescence, she felt similarly awkward. She felt like she didn't know what was going to happen next or how to be; she felt unsettled by the changes in her body but, she says, she had friends going through the same thing and films and articles and music which addressed the strangeness and alienation of adolescence, so she didn't feel completely alone.

But as she went through her pregnancy, she did not feel accompanied. Part of this may have been because she, herself, did not understand what was happening to her mind, her body, or her self — and therefore she could not really talk about it with others.

She says that missing from pregnancy books or health apps was information about how pregnancy affects a woman's mind. She quotes Rosemary Balsam from the Western New England Psychoanalytic Society as calling this the "vanished pregnant body."

She suggests that the very idea of the pregnant woman, of being two people in one, makes other people uncomfortable.

For example, there's the the story of the runner, Allyson Felix. Allison was an Olympic medalist and many time US National Champion when she became pregnant. One of her sponsors, Nike, cut her pay by 70% and refused to offer her reasonable pay protection during her postpartum period. She reported that they said "runners should just run" - in other words, women runners should not be pregnant.

Clearly being pregnant was uncomfortable for Jones, as it is for so many women — and not just because of the bodily changes, but also because of the emotional disequilibrium she felt and because of the changes in the way she perceived others as seeing her.

Experiencing this was hard for Jones because she felt external pressure to "pretend that pregnancy was a less dramatic and drastic event" than what she felt it to be.

And it is a dramatic and drastic event. For all women.

Thank goodness for Lucy Jones for saying so and letting us all heave a sigh of relief. We didn't have to say it. But she did.

Toward the end of her pregnancy, Jones describes bowing out of work and not feeling guilty. She realized this was not typical of her — but she felt that she wanted to be at home and she didn't mind being alone. She says that she felt "calm and placid, pleasantly vague, like nothing could touch me".

Later she found out that this is normal — that there are physiological changes that accompany each of the many stages of pregnancy and that at the end of pregnancy, the reactivity to the stress hormones is dampened. No wonder she didn't feel the normal pressure to work and perform and please her boss. And luckily for her, she had the ability to step away.

The biology and neurobiological literature supports Jones. When she reports that she felt that her brain was changing during her pregnancies, she was right. In one study by Niu et all (2024), ten pregnant women were followed over the course of their pregnancies. Changes in brain structure were charted. Reductions in gray matter volume were found over the course of pregnancy. In other words — the pregnant woman's brain actually shrinks! Their conclusion? There are profound neurobiological changes during pregnancy.

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In a review of the literature, Esel (2010) found evidence that the brains of pregnant women and women with children are very different from the brains of women who have not had children who are within the same age range. Moreover, Esel found ample evidence of neurobiological and hormonal influences on women and their feelings and behavior. She says that maternal behavior develops over the course of a woman's life, including during pregnancy. This happens through the development of special neural networks, which are cooperatively developed by genetic, environmental, and hormonal factors.

In fact, the biology is fascinating. Esel points out the importance of hormonal influences in preparing women for motherhood. She says that estrogen, prolactin, and oxytocin stimulate maternal behavior after birth — and that the stimulation of the vagina during birth initiates the release of oxytocin, so important for the initiation of maternal behavior as well as milk production. She also discusses the finding that women are prepared to become mothers from their own birth. She says that early exposure to estrogen during the perinatal period in their own early lives may be responsible for women's greater interest in and facility with social relationships over that of men. She suggests that this capacity primes women to be interested in and to relate to their infants once they become mothers. Then, during pregnancy the capacity for relating to their own infants is further primed by the high levels of progesterone and estrogen which are secreted. Furthermore, she says that the hormonal exposure of the brain during pregnancy plays an important role in the development of maternal neural networks and systems.

In the same vein Esel says that in humans, the ability to establish social relationships is inversely related to levels of fetal testosterone both in females and males — so in other words, men, from birth, are less primed to establish social relationships.

No wonder women feel different when they are pregnant — and no wonder they feel a shift in both body and identity. The hormonal influences on their brains, their bodies, their feelings and their behavior are powerful.

I look forward to reading the rest of Jones's book to find out more about the research on the physiological and psychological changes that come about during pregnancy. I know too little about this.

In fact, most of us know too little about this.

Scientists are looking at aspects of the woman's experience during pregnancy in a way that they might not have considered doing years ago, even though we have needed this information for a long time. But perhaps, as Jones suggests, science waited until there were enough women in the field to make this a priority.