Theoria

Lifecourse Matrescence©

What is Matrescence?

Matrescence is a term coined by anthropologist Dana Raphael (1926-2016). It refers to the critical transition period of mother-becoming, or rite of passage, in which physiological changes, group status, emotional life, daily activities, identity, and relationships shift and change.

Dr. Jessica Spring Weappa extends this definition to what she calls Lifecourse Matrescence©. The lifecourse perspective is a paradigm encompassing multiple social and historical factors in a person’s life from birth to death. Caregiving and mothering practices are transformational and impact mothers beyond one specific stage or phase of life. Mothering continues in changed and changing ways alongside children’s phases of life and as mothers reach midlife, perhaps become grandmothers, and ripen into elderhood. The Lifecourse Matrescence© lens brings maternal identity into the foreground and situates it in the transformational depth and richness of a whole life.

Ecocultural Matrescence and Regeneration©

Ecocultural Identity is a framework that helps us remember that our natural life support systems are integral to human life and that we are more than our individual, social, and cultural selves.

Regeneration is a natural feature of matrescence just as it is a natural phenomenon of life. Especially as climate crises continue to arise, we are becoming increasingly aware that we not so set apart from our environment. The bio-psycho-social-spiritual rites of passage and transitions of mother becoming are by nature ecocultural. Becoming more aware of this helps us better understand, more carefully navigate, and more clearly articulate our place within the integral nature of things. Matrescence throughout the lifecourse is inseparable from our natural life support systems. How we develop as mothers amidst ecological realities, and in relationship with our ecological beingness is ecocultural matrescence©.

As Mothers, we meet new aspects of ourselves while we care for our children, as they reach their own new developmental stages and milestones. We likely learn to mother ourselves in new ways, or to heal our own untended wounds, as we mother others.

Mothering Futures® encourages special attention to renascence, renewal, and thriving through ongoing transitions in relationship with supportive community and surroundings, including our natural life support systems.

Mothering holds immeasurable value. A historical lack of value for caregiving and mothering is tied to the same symbolic disorder that underpins the exploitation of nature. Mothering Futures® offerings are rooted in an understanding that individual transformation is connected to familial, ancestral, cultural, social, and environmental transformation from a whole-systems point of view.

MĀTER© Maternal Ethics Tree of Knowledge

Like forests that communicate and share nourishment through intricate and complex underground systems, including the lattices of mycorrhizae that interconnect deep in the soil along the roots of mother trees, we too have lifelines of nurturance and resilience, however seemingly hidden or silent beneath the surfaces of modern life. Our ecological environment reveals generous, cooperative, and regenerative processes we are also encoded to live.

Mothering Futures® synthesizes maternal scholarship with matricultural knowledge and ecocultural perspectives to highlight relational interdependence and to explore a cultural shift from illusions of separation to realities of kinship.

MĀTER© is the Mothering Futures® Maternal Ethics Certification Program. It offers wisdom through the strata, roots, trunk, branches, leaves, flowers, and seeds of the Maternal Ethics Tree of Knowledge© articulated by Dr. Jessica Spring Weappa in her doctoral dissertation, in various academic conferences, and in a forthcoming peer reviewed collection on Mothering and Climate Change with Demeter Press. Extending maternal ethics from ethics of care in relationship with multiple matricentric and scientific fields of inquiry, this framework regenerates interdependent ways of knowing, being, and doing to nurture a more humane humanity and to (r)evolutionize our futures.

(R)evolutionary Matrisophy©

(R)evolutionary Matrisophy© is a practice and methodology introduced by Jessica Spring Weappa, Ph.D. in her doctoral dissertation. It begins with reflection upon one’s own personal narrative, relationships, and lineages to remember the presence of mothering in its nourishing, healing, and transformative potentials. This method continues to investigate the “missing mother” in personal experience, throughout history, and in present society. Through writing that is rite-ing, (R)evolutionary Matrisophy is informed by thealogy, which embraces female and other diverse perspectives of divinity. It enacts a careful retrieval of iconography, images, myths, and stories that have been subjugated, suppressed, and subsumed through time. A rite is a ceremony or ritual that can interrupt time as a cyclical or linear process by creating a movement of perpetual return, or what feminist philosopher Fanny Söderbäck refers to as “revolutionary time” that neither forgets nor repeats the past but remains open to the possibility of change.

Though the term revolutionary can be defined in many ways, the focus of this method are the conditions for metamorphosis to occur. The Latin revolvere means “to roll back”, and the Middle English revolucioun refers to cosmological process, and “fundamental change in the way of thinking or visualizing something.” (R)evolutionary Matrisophy is also a righting in that it attempts to restore, redress, and rectify wrong turns in history that have limited our capacities to love and care for our kin and our natural life support systems. It is an enactment of maternal love in research, writing, art, and education.

(R)evolutionary Matrisophy is both revolutionary and evolutionary, highlighting a need to revisit and reauthor evolutionary narratives about human beings and relationality. Definitions of evolution being a “gradual development or progression of something into a more complex form” and a process of progressive change and development are most relevant to this method. Though philosophy traditionally means love of wisdom, “philo” is replaced by “matri-” to (re)turn Sophia (sophy) to a knowledge loving process that re-emplaces Wisdom within the continuum of human evolution, re-integrating distinctly maternal love.

A tree trunk is a conduit and anchor that delivers nourishment to the whole of a tree. It produces new bark from within to adapt to outer conditions and to facilitate the needs of the whole tree from strata, mycorrhizal networks, and roots to branches, leaves, flowers, and seeds. Envisioning (R)evolutionary Matrisophy as the “maternal ethics tree of knowledge” facilitates a continuous connection of maternal meaning-making that remains grounded in metaformic origins and evolutionary baselines as they are articulated now, and as they continue to be refined. (R)evolutionary Matrisophy retrieves, reauthors, and recenters maternal and matricultural knowledge to restore matristic ways of knowing, being, and doing.

Introducing Mythopoeic Matrignosis©, Dr. Jessica Spring Weappa invites a re-mythologizing of the maternal in contemporary contexts and re-mythologizing of ancient myths that have excluded, bypassed, subsumed, and attempted to obliterate the maternal—or that story the maternal into submission. There is a need to re-mother mythology through maternal wisdom lenses. Mythopoeic Matrignosis© calls for a shift in consciousness to remember, reauthor, and recenter mothers as valued, whole, distinctly embodied, and socially provisioned. This process honors the care and caring ethics of attuned and loving mothers, motherers, and allomothers in the co-creation of regenerative and flourishing futures.