Welldoing Inspiration Awards 2024 Winner: Lucy Jones

We're thrilled to announce Lucy Jones, author of Matrescence, as a Welldoing Inspiration Awards 2024 winner
Matrescence describes the experience of becoming a mother. Science writer Lucy Jones read it first in a newspaper and felt her shoulders drop. A new mother, she was “profoundly shocked by becoming a mother, I found the identity change, the social change, loneliness, the oppressive maternal ideals all really tricky. And then I started to see that this was a significant step in our development that had been forgotten.”
Her book Matrescence, published last year (and a Welldoing Book of the Month), has been a big hit among many mothers and those who want to help them. As Lucy points out the rise of intensive motherhood in this century in conjunction with more knowledge about child development has left many mothers with “shocking levels of tiredness, stress burnout, compounded by the mask of motherhood - a real sense of shame stigma and silencing but those who couldn’t even talk about they feel. The psychological police state of motherhood is still strong.”
Thousands of readers have been in touch with Lucy to talk about their own experience of pregnancy, childbirth and parenting. She has found it “healing to hear that others feel the same, but also it makes me more enraged and emboldened to continue talking about the subject. It’s not just inadequate social support but also the experience of motherhood is taboo.”
Lucy was delighted to win a Welldoing Inspiration Award. “I love what you have created with Welldoing, and I am a big fan of therapy and have got so much from talking to therapists over the last 15 years. Also, to be nominated by Zoe [Blaskey, of the podcast Motherkind] is really special.”
Zoe too felt that too many mothers were under extreme pressure, and both women felt that initiatives such as their own could only help give a voice to their emotions as they went through the process of becoming mothers.
You can find a therapist who specialises in areas related to maternal mental health here welldoing.org/...
See our other winners here: welldoing.org/...

[@WhoseBirthdayIsIt]

Thank you Zoe and Lucy. I think It's an absolutely startling omission, that a woman can go through nine, life altering months of pregnancy, which culminate in an event, that's unparalleled in the scope and depth of human physiology and it not be acknowledged that on the day her child is born, that she too has had a BIRTH DAY and now she’s thrown into another phase, essentially (in western culture, by herself to 24/7 keep another human alive, how?).