Matrescence (Phase 1)
This is my body given for you
Matrescence is a word I had never heard until halfway through pregnancy. Its definition is simply the process of becoming a mother.
If you’re in my corner of Substack, you’re seeing it everywhere. Becoming a mother is hard. Pieces of it are not as “natural” as you would hope, e.g., learning to breastfeed. There is much ambivalence.
I am processing these realities. Since being a little girl, I absorbed the fact that upon the birth of your child, the pain of labor is forgotten and all that remains is pure ecstasy. That you will be overwhelmed by the love that pours forth from your heart.
What I have learned is that within motherhood is a love that grows. That a newborn is a new person who you have to get to know. That the love I have for my sweet baby is overwhelming indeed; in fact, it frightens me. I feel terror in the face of surrendering to it. When I look at her, my heart aches because I love her. It is not often as pleasant of a sensation as I imagined.
I have learned that amidst the joy I feel beholding this new and precious life, the memory of pain remains. It is not completely washed away. Its essence is intermingled in my matrescence. Pregnancy and childbirth broke me, rent me, humbled me, laid me out flat. I have been stripped, and I am not the same. A scar lines my lower abdomen, a lifelong symbol of the breaking open and surrender that birth is.
I anticipated matrescence to be an abstract becoming. It would be my mental shift into a new identity. Yet, it seems that the first phase of matrescence for me is more embodied than I expected.
This first phase is experienced in stretch marks and permanent scars. Loose skin and clogged milk ducts.
I remember the woman who visited our women’s group in college. She was a new mom with tired eyes, somewhat uneasily holding a fresh baby. She said she had never before been able to so viscerally understand the meaning of Jesus’ words, “This is my body, given for you.” Those words stuck with me. They were beautiful and mysterious. I longed to experience them myself. I pondered them frequently during many miserable moments of pregnancy in an attempt to remind myself of the purpose of the suffering.
I recently looked back at pictures of a 19 year old Alexis. Hot pink bikini top, flat stomach, toned legs; a bit vain and preoccupied with how she was perceived. I do not resent her, but I do now look down at my current self and make a comparison. I see the way my body is indelibly scarred and stretched. This is the price of bearing new life, and it is the door to a new version of myself. I do not wish it to appear as if it never happened. It proves what hard, exhausting work it was. How pregnancy felt like I was being unmade. How the act of creating another eternal soul is permanent itself.
Still, I grieve a bit.
I am a mom now. My body is not my own. It suffered to create a new life. It suffered to bring her forth. It sometimes continues to suffer to provide sustenance for her. The tiny stretch mark scars atop my thighs simultaneously arouse wonder and disgust. Pieces of me are literally torn and irreversibly changed.
And yet, I am also amazed. It feels akin to a caterpillar’s transformation into a butterfly. In a sense, I have emerged anew and have grown more into who I was created to be.
I grew a new human within my own body. This is my body, given for you.
To save her life, I was cut open. This is my body, given for you.
I feed her with my very self. This is my body, given for you.
In a world obsessed with maintaining youth and vigor, this might seem absurd. Perhaps my 19-year old body might appear objectively more beautiful than my current one. But my current body is an icon. It is a window into givenness, sacrifice, maturity, and ultimately love - all things God has revealed to us about Himself. Indeed, after His resurrection, His scars remained.1
I feel proud happy empowered honored to be a mother. It is a gift that has been bestowed upon me. The invitation into this identity is sanctifying, down to the very ways my body operates and appears. Just as Adam recognized that Eve was like him (and yet different) upon seeing her body, this changed body is helping me along my journey of matrescence, revealing to me who I am.2
I look in the mirror, and my body tells me, you are a mother.
“There is a deep connection between the mystery of creation, as a gift springing from love, and that beatifying "beginning" of the existence of man as male and female, in the whole truth of their body and their sex, which is the pure and simple truth of communion between persons. When the first man exclaimed, at the sight of the woman: "This is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh" (Gn 2:23), he merely affirmed the human identity of both. Exclaiming in this way, he seems to say that here is a body that expresses the person.
According to a preceding passage of the Yahwist text, it can also be said that this "body" reveals the "living soul," such as man became when God-Yahweh breathed life into him (cf. Gn 2:7). This resulted in his solitude before all other living beings. By traversing the depth of that original solitude, man now emerged in the dimension of the mutual gift. The expression of that gift - and for that reason the expression of his existence as a person - is the human body in all the original truth of its masculinity and femininity.” // Pope St. John Paul II