3 Sept 2026
Ep 96 Claire Tonti on birth trauma, becoming a Mum and matrescence.
We have a word for almost everything these days. But the most remarkable transformation a human body and brain can go through - the one that neuroscientists are now calling the biggest neuroendocrine event of the human lifespan - most of us can't name at all.
The word is MATRESCENCE (https://www.matrescencefilm.com/). It describes the passage into motherhood, and if you've never heard it until now, that's part of the whole wicked problem.
'Matrescence' was coined in 1973 by the anthropologist Dana Raphael, the same woman who gave us the word "doula". One word took, but the other all but vanished for the next three decades. This is despite the fact that there are two billion mothers on the planet, and yet until very recently, the transition that miraculously makes women 'mothers' remains one of the least studied, least understood experiences in human development.
This, sadly, tells you something about how little we have valued mothers in modern societies: we kept the word for the ‘helper’ but we lost the word for ‘her’.
In this episode of Human Cogs, Mads (https://www.instagram.com/madeleinegrummet/?hl=en) as a mother of four reflects on her own experience of motherhood and joins the wonderful singer-songwriter and filmmaker Claire Tonti (https://www.clairetonti.com/), whose documentary ‘Matrescence: The Hidden World of M/otherhood (https://www.matrescencefilm.com/)’ will premiere in Australia and globally this November.
Tonti didn't set out to become a global advocate for motherhood or to create a global documentary about it. She set out, instead, at the age of 29, to have a baby and a natural birth with maternal agency.
But what she got was a sixteen-hour, life-threatening labour and traumatic birth with a forceps delivery, an episiotomy that tore, emergency surgery and then afterwards, the rude shock of new motherhood which meant 24/7 responsibility for a tiny being when she was at her most physically vulnerable, emotionally fragile and entirely disillusioned with mothering in the modern world.
Tonti describes her early years of motherhood as being lonely and isolated with no village to guide and hold her, and her battle to withstand the societal pressure to “enjoy every moment oh it goes so fast” only to surf through the waves of grief, rage, fear, ambivalence and identity shifts that beset her as a new mother.
It was only years later, burnt out and unwell, that Tonti typed "motherhood" into Google looking for a synonym and a way to describe how she felt, and then found the word and movement that would reorder her life.
For her documentary, Tonti travelled from the edge of the largest informal settlement in Nairobi to the corporate towers of New York looking for the motherhood village we've lost. What she found, again and again, was that cultures with almost nothing still pour their resources into caring for a new mother because they understand something we've forgotten: when a baby is born, a mother is born again too, and she is just as fragile and precious and in need of swaddling and reverence as the tiny child.
What Tonti also found is that there is very little reverence for new-born mothers here in Australia. One in three women experience birth trauma. One in five women currently experience a perinatal mental health disorder, and, devastatingly, suicide is still the leading cause of death for women in the first year postpartum.
Honouring matrescence is how we hold and support new-born mothers through the births, the joy, the fear, the trauma, the tenderness and the everyday extraordinary miracle of birthing and raising a real live human being.
Of course, naming a thing doesn't fix it. But it does tell a woman, in the seismic tidal waves of matrescence, that she isn't broken: she is becoming, again and again.
We hope you embrace the word, read more about it, and that you enjoy this conversation with the wonderful Claire Tonti.
Thanks for listening, and here’s to the mothers across the world.
Guest: Claire Tonti
Album: Matrescence (https://www.clairetonti.com/album)
Documentary: Matrescence: The Hidden Wor (https://www.matrescencefilm.com/)ld Of M/otherhood (https://www.matrescencefilm.com/)
Instagram: @clairetonti (https://www.instagram.com/clairetonti/?hl=en)
Website: clair (://www.clairetonti.com/)etonti.com (://www.clairetonti.com/) (://www.clairetonti.com/)
Host: Madeleine Hanger Grummet Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/madeleinegrummet/) Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/madeleinegrummet/?hl=en) Website
(https://www.madeleinegrummet.com/)
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