S7E10: "How's Your Matrescence Going?" — The Word for the Metamorphosis of Motherhood — and Why Our Built Environment Is Failing It, with Lucy Jones

Lucy Jones is a journalist and the author of Losing Eden — an investigation into what nature does for the human psyche, written from inside her own recovery from depression — and Matrescence, a memoir-meets-neuroscience of the developmental transition into motherhood. The word was coined in the 1970s by anthropologist Dana Raphael and brought back into circulation in 2017 by reproductive psychiatrist Alexandra Sacks. Most cultures across human history have marked this transition with rites and rituals. Contemporary Western societies, broadly, do not. In this episode, Lucy and I talk about why the word matters, and why the built environment is a maternal mental health issue — narrow pavements, dominant cars, playgrounds without benches, libraries closing under austerity. Why Bogotá's manzanas del cuidado (care blocks) might be the most underrated urban infrastructure in the world. Why nearby nature — the cemetery five minutes from the door, the pocket forest at the bottom of the walk-up — is not a consolation prize but the entire point. How a community bioblitz, iNaturalist, and the City Nature Challenge can give a beloved patch of land enough teeth to survive a planning meeting. And the question I have been quietly reorganising my whole intellectual life around: what if we stopped asking how nature heals us, and started asking how to design communities that don't require us to heal constantly? Find Lucy at lucyfjones.com. Matrescence and Losing Eden are available wherever you buy books.