World Mental Health Day Matrescence Matters

Oct 9

4 min read

post written by Ruby Thompson, Director of Baby Brain and Co-Artistic Director of The Herd.

This is the image used on the poster for Baby Brain. It's me and my baby when she was 3 months old.

It’s World Mental Health day on 10th October.

I’ve co-wrote and directed a show called Baby Brain that is being performed today in the Parks Family Hub in Hull.

There’ll be 20 babies and 20 of their parents in a small hall right about now watching a story about having a baby, growing a babies brain.

I hope the babies are fascinated, excited and entertained by the show. I hope the mothers are entertained too, but I also hope if they are experiencing some of the more complex things about becoming a mother, I hope they feel seen in the show and less alone in the watching.

It’s a story based on my own experience of my brain changing as I had a baby. I was shopping in Tesco 20 weeks pregnant when I had my first ever panic attack. What followed was 3 months of not being able to leave the house because of prenatal anxiety.

When my baby was born these symptoms didn’t go away. It wasn’t just a hormonal phase I felt forever changed by the experience.

5 years on and after the help of therapy and an understanding of the science of matrescence, I can reframe my experience as very understandable. I still have difficult periods but I’m more accepting with understanding and so they have less impact on my life.

Maternal brains rewire in pregnancy and the postnatal period. This rewiring is a superpower, capacity for empathy grows, ability to read your babies cues, and a hyper sensitivity to keep your baby safe.

However it also increases your fear response (I always thought my mum was daft for not being able to watch scary stuff on telly, I completely relate now), and temporarily reduces your grey matter in the short term making you more forgetful. In the long term I feel like I exist with a whole new compartment in my brain for my daughter. Returning to work felt very strange initially almost as if I had 2 brains in my head that I had to go between.

The above changes are not disorders they are a the effects of a healthy, changing brain, that happens to everyone in matrescence.

But this rewiring period also leaves maternal brains very vulnerable. If experiencing matrescence whilst going through a difficult life event for example, or past traumas can resurface, or conditions can come when there can be no clear ‘reason’. This rewiring can be a huge, complex, life changing thing to navigate.

Motherhood is also a process barraged with guilt. My struggles were not just in experiencing a panic disorder, but also in the accompanying shame for so long around it. I felt I was broken, that it was my fault for being weak, not a ‘good mum’ for having let myself experience it.

Now I understand so much more. I understand the inevitability of change in motherhood, and I understand that it is not under our control if mental health conditions come up.

I hope that people in watching our show Baby Brain people who may be experiencing these things can better understand this too.

Making the show has been a form of art therapy for me. In sharing my experience with other mums in the creative team who completely get it, and in sharing it with audiences and seeing mums moved by the story as they completely get it, I have felt validated. It’s a sort of gift to my former self. You were changed Ruby, not broken.

I came across an NSPCC programme for prenatal anxiety called Pregnancy in Mind and I wanted to share.

https://learning.nspcc.org.uk/services-children-families/pregnancy-in-mind

It’s about sharing the science and tools to understand what you might be experiencing.

And I’ll leave this blog post with the lyrics from one of the songs in Baby Brain written by Yssi Wombwell and Sam Caseley as I think it describes what I’m talking about best.

It’s changed in here