A few years ago, I became a mother for the first time,
an immersive new reality.
I'm a science journalist at the BBC and I've spent over a year
researching the science behind how motherhood changes us
and why this change can feel so stark and overwhelming.
I was intrigued when I came across these intimate diaries
about the experiences of new motherhood written by a Dutch doctor in the 1980s.
Her words struck a chord even three decades later.
I had a strong
drive to do something and to be able to fulfil that.
Almost everything changes during this time.
And I think women aren't fully prepared to adapt.
Yeah, maybe the maternal brain is a bit misunderstood.
Is the orchestra of the brain activation?
The way society looks upon you changes hugely.
Guilt doesn't necessarily need to be intrinsically intertwined with the experience of motherhood.
I now live in the UK.
I was born in the Netherlands, so I travelled back to my home country
with my two children in tow to meet Dr Marga Van den Eijnden,
the author of those diaries.
You wrote a lot of diaries during your early time as a mother.
Can you tell me why you were writing about motherhood?
I think it's a way to express myself because life was changing rapidly,
and I suddenly realised, wow, this is really life changing.
I've been longing so much to become pregnant,
but it wasn't possible, I had to finish my study, do my work at the hospital.
So it was not possible.
And then I had never really dealt with children.
It was a way to reflect and to see how I could reflect
on this new part of myself. It's totally different.
Motherhood is emotional and can be difficult.
For years, studying it has been somewhat ignored.
These incredible academics are part of a growing body of research
that's trying to correct this to understand why motherhood can be
such a momentous, joyous struggle.
Studying the maternal and brain is immensely fascinating.
If the role of parenting is really important for children's development,
it is really important for us to understand that how we become a parent.
We need to get that balance a bit more right
between not wanting to scare women, but also giving the information
that they need in order to be fully prepared for what's happening.
And I think realising
that and seeing how things are different within different cultures is just fascinating.
I think we need to radically reimagine the way that we understand
what it means to be a mother and a father in our society today.
We can do different and better by mothers.
Am I already doing not enough for you. I'm pregnant.
I'm pregnant, I'm still working. How am I going to do it when you're here?
Can I do a training? It's difficult for me, to be a doctor and to be a mum.
How to combine that?
I became a mother thirty one years later,
over 30 years after you became a mother, and I have those same feelings,
why do you think that we had such similar experiences?
The reality is that motherhood is is common at the same time
that it's also a source of inequality in day to day life.
Though motherhood looks different wherever you look, we begin
with changes that are common to many mothers,
as researcher Saskia van Schaik at Utrecht University explains.
There's obviously the physiological change.
So, you know, your your hormones and everything,
make a woman change when they turn into being a mother.
These physiological changes during pregnancy
are probably the best studied part of motherhood.
They are driven by hormones, tiny messengers that move
around your body to start molecular cascade events that generally result
in genes being switched on or off in specific cell types,
causing changes in the proteins these cells are producing.
Hence, changes in cell function and an overall physiological change.
Here we see how some key hormones change during pregnancy and their effects.
And as amazing as these little molecules are at transforming a woman into a mother,
many of these changes come at a cost.
I spoke with psychologist Catherine Preston
from the University of York and asked her to explain why.
So there's quite a lot of different changes that are going on,
and these can have quite a large effect on how people feel about themselves.
There's three key themes:
So there's the appearance, it's feeling dissatisfied
with the way they appear to other people
in the kind of clothes that they have to wear, their change in wardrobe
or that they're developing bump being too small or too big.
But there's also concerns about excess weight gain
and also the physical burdens of pregnancy.
So being frustrated that you can't do the same sort
of things that you could do before that you were pregnant.
And some of our research has shown that negative feelings
about these kind of body changes during pregnancy can impact
on the bond that's developing with the unborn baby.
There are many things driving these kinds of negative feelings.
And fortunately, during pregnancy, you still don't get a let off
from the sort of pressure of how you should appear.
That is, magazines, the media
and the construction of the ideal woman and mother.
Your physical state has such an obvious visual symbol of this baby bump.
Then people kind of, I don't know, they feel like they own it somehow.
And so they, you know, a lot of the time
people wouldn't comment on whether your body was large or small,
but they feel free to do that when you're pregnant.
And also, they sometimes even feel free to touch the bump.
It feels like everyone seems to own your body.
For me, it felt both incredibly empowering and extremely fragile
to be consumed by another human in such an increasingly visible way.
Gradually, we become mum before woman in a way that can feel uncomfortable
if how people perceive us overrides who we feel we are.
Pregnant first, woman second.
We focus quite a bit on these negative aspects because we want
to know how to help people and how to kind of put interventions in.
But there was also a very positive experience during birth.
So a lot of women reported feeling in awe of their bodies,
getting really proud that they were able to create this baby.
And, you know, women who then choose to go on to breastfeed,
feeling in awe of the fact that their body is able to provide this food
for their child to help them grow.
So there's all these really nice positive aspects,
and we should help women to focus on those,
on the wonder of their body being able to do this.
And I don't feel restful in myself and I have to fight to find inner peace.
And so I was complaining a bit to myself
I also used the diary to complain or to put my complex feelings down.
Sometimes it was not always easy.