Audio only
The Maternal Arc
How the Brain, Identity, Relationships, and Work Reorganize Across Pregnancy, Birth, and Beyond By Amira Jerroum
Length3h 43m
About this audiobook
Something shifts when you become a mother, and the hardest part is not always the change itself. It is not knowing how to read it.
The Maternal Arc explores the disorienting transition into motherhood before familiar labels—hormones, baby brain, anxiety, weakness, transformation—reduce or romanticize what is happening. Drawing on neuroscience, psychology, matrescence, evolutionary history, and social analysis, it examines how motherhood can reorganize attention, identity, relationships, work, fear, and energy.
This is not a guide to mastering motherhood or turning difficulty into self-improvement. It asks what is strain, what is sharpened perception, what belongs to the body, and what belongs to the life around her.
For women considering motherhood, living through it, or looking back years later, The Maternal Arc offers language for a passage too often minimized, moralized, or idealized—and gives women back the right to look before accepting someone else’s verdict.
Audiobook details
GenrePsychology, Health and Wellness
Length3 hrs 43 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateJun 16, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1THE MATERNAL ARC
2Dedication
3Introduction
4Chapter 1: The Shift Beneath the Symptoms
5Chapter 2: What the Science Actually Says
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6Chapter 3: Matrescence: The Identity That Doesn't Fit Anymore
7Chapter 4: Origins, Ancestors, and the Wider Pattern
8Chapter 5: The Conditions That Support the Shift
9Chapter 6: When the Signal Gets Buried
10Chapter 7: The Partner Transition
11Chapter 8: How Relationships Reorganize
12Chapter 9: Work and the End of Automatic Overfunctioning
13Chapter 10: When the Mind Rehearses the Worst
14Chapter 11: The New Logic of Energy
15Chapter 12: The Season You're In
16Acknowledgements
17A Note on Sources
18Notes and References
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