TRANSCRIPT: Notes From Dunfanaghy 6 – Matrescence and the Process of Becoming an Artist
Hi, it’s Megan. Welcome to today’s Notes from Dunfanaghy.
So over the weekend I’ve been reading Lucy Jones’ new book, which is called Matrescence. It’s just come out in the UK and Ireland. I don’t think it’s out in the US or around the world yet, but hopefully it’s coming soon. So it’s all about the process of becoming a mother. That’s what this word, matrescence, means.
Aside from the period of adolescence, matrescence — the process of pregnancy, birth and beyond — is like the most significant metamorphosis that a human body goes through. And it is not researched enough or discussed enough, but it’s fascinating.
And it really — my understanding of matrescence has really helped me over the years understand the metamorphosis that I feel like I’ve gone through, to kind of go from being — I don’t even know how I would describe it — like a business owner before, or someone who was not in touch with their real work, let’s say that, before — to someone who is in touch with their real work, which for me, I define that as an artist. I think if you’re doing your real work, if you’re doing the work that is born out of who you are innately as a human being, and your experiences and your story, you’re an artist.
And so let me try and explain why these two things are linked for me and what I’ve been thinking about.
So matrescence is a wild time. Like when you get pregnant, your body immediately starts to change on all of these different levels. And then it continues to change through birth and postpartum and all of that. Your brain is changed forever, your body changes, there’s psychological changes, there are social changes, there are emotional changes. It really is like another adolescence. The hormones are doing all kinds of crazy things.
So it’s this very palpable biological change that, unless you have some language for it, can be very discombobulating.
And so I can’t remember exactly when I discovered the term matrescence and some work around it. It was certainly after I had had my first child, and it was this tethering, anchoring thing — like just having the language immediately makes a difference, to understand, like, okay, I’m undergoing this metamorphosis, this is the process that I’m in, and what I’m experiencing is normal for this process.
And so I don’t think there is a word for the process of becoming an artist, but I think we need one. And I think that that is partly what I am trying to do in my work — to put some language around what that process looks like and feels like.
And I think that a large part of what people are drawn to in my work is — it’s not really — people know what their work is. Sometimes you need to have a container to figure that out, and you need someone to bounce ideas off, and you need a space where it feels like, okay, it’s safe to set down everything that I think I’m supposed to be doing and connect with the thing that I really can’t not do.
But essentially, I believe that everyone knows what their real work is, whether we allow ourselves to consciously know it or not — we know it. And so it’s not like anyone is coming to me and I’m figuring out what their work is for them, or defining their work for them. I’m just mostly walking alongside them as they unearth it for themselves. Because we know — you know, your body knows, has a sense of what your real work is. It has a sense of what the work is that only you can do.
And that might not be crystal clear, but in general, we know what direction we should be moving in. The most difficult thing, I think, is trusting your instincts and understanding that the transition into fully embracing your real work is a major psychological and emotional shift. It is a metamorphosis that we go through.
And I wonder if it might even be physical as well. One of the things that has jumped out at me towards the beginning of this Matrescence book, she says that there are studies that have shown that the brains of non-parents — so even if you didn’t carry a baby and birth a baby, just the process of caregiving for an infant and interacting with an infant a lot — there are studies that show that that changes the brains of anybody.
And so — I need to think about this some more, and I’m noodling on it, but I just have a sense that, I’m sure, if it was studied, our brains are changing as we move more and more into taking an artistic approach to our work and allowing ourselves to do the work that only we can do and making that our number one thing.
So I think that we really are going through this metamorphosis, and we need support. You can’t do that — maybe you can do that by yourself, but it’s really hard, and I think the most important thing is we’re not supposed to do it by ourselves.
I think about a quote that was first shared with me by Ellie Durant, who has been a customer of mine for a long time — she’s a midwife and an author. We were having a conversation, I interviewed her, I think it was during an interview — I interviewed her about birth, and whatever her brain scheme I was up to at that point. And whenever I interviewed her, she shared this quote with me. So it’s from the sociologist Barbara Katz Rothman. And the quote is: birth is not only about making babies. Birth is about making mothers — strong, competent, capable mothers, who trust themselves and know their inner strength.
So whenever I heard that quote, later that day, I couldn’t get that quote out of my head. And later that day, on my little whiteboard where I was collecting my ideas, I wrote down “making mothers,” and then next to it, I wrote “making artists.” Because there is something about that quote — like, if I make that quote about art —
And why I was connecting those two things is: the more, after I had an experience of birth, and the more I understood about birth, the more I was able to find language for the creative process and how I experienced my work and how my work came into being. And so if I make this quote about art, and I define art as your real work — and I think your real work, or our real work, is what we make in response to the question, what’s worth doing even if it fails. It’s this thing that we are driven to do because of the process of doing it. And it’s not really about the outcome.
So we’re all artists. And when I talk about art, I’m talking about your work, regardless of whether you officially think of yourself as an artist or not. So if I make the quote about art, then it would be: art is not only about making work. Art is about making artists — strong, competent, capable artists, who trust themselves and know their inner strength.
I think that is what my work is about. I think that is what people are drawn to in my work. And I think that we need a word equivalent to adolescence or matrescence to describe this metamorphosis that we undergo when we become true artists in our professional lives.
I don’t know if I have anything more to say on that today. I’m going to be noodling on this one for a while. There is a lot here.
I would be very interested to know wherever you’re at on the journey to doing your real work, moving further into your real work, making it like the core thing that you do — wherever you’re at, or if you feel like you’re still just figuring out exactly what your real work is. I would be really curious to know if you feel like you have experienced this kind of metamorphosis — like, are you experiencing psychological change, emotional change, social change, physical change?
I’d be really curious to hear more about your experience on this, if you’re willing to share.
Thank you for listening. I will be back tomorrow with more musings on whatever it is I’m thinking about in the run-up to the Dunfanaghy retreat this September. See you later.