About My Matrescence Project

As a “data person”, I had this vague idea that data would help me parent. After my daughter was born, it turns out I was sort of wrong and sort of right about that (as with so many of the things I thought I knew about what motherhood was going to be). Recorded observational data was of almost no use at all to me. Indeed, as I tried to navigate becoming a mother, I discovered that the process of collecting such data was in many ways actively detrimental to my wellbeing. Letting go of this though, allowed more space for the infinite wealth of qualitative data I have been amassing in my mind-body-heart (i.e., my lived experience). This data turns out to be invaluable in guiding me through this turbulent phase of my life.

Matrescence has been the biggest change and challenge of my adult life, bringing with it new extremes for every emotion and experience. It may be recency bias, but I’m sure I’ve never felt as joyful as when I make my baby laugh, or as deeply inadequate as when my body couldn’t make enough milk for her to thrive. My existence has been indelibly divided into “before baby” and “after baby”, and even the things that have stayed the same are different.

As a data communicator, charts are an important part of my sense-making process. Data visualisation is inherently about exploring change, contrast, and difference; and as my daughter got a little older, I found myself starting to yearn for the languages of data visualisation to help me express what I am experiencing. The data I wanted to visualise though, was not the meticulously tracked feeds and nappy outputs of her early days, or the wealth of digital trace data lurking in my camera roll and messenger chats. It was everything sitting inside my mind-body-heart, the transformation of my life and self.

This project is about (mis?)-appropriating my preferred visual language to meet this need. I want to explore this experience, I want to use this form of expression – so I will, even if it feels like it’s against “the rules”. Inspired by Randall Munroe and Georgia Lupi (and a wealth of others), I’ve started translating my matrescence experience into a visual form, encoding it as lines, bars, and dots. Creating this work has been an intuitive visual process, rather than the procedural programmatic approaches that I rely on in other contexts. It’s a very different space to play in (portrait video, what?!), but it feels very liberating.

Are these charts accurate? Mostly. Are they misleading? Not intentionally. Are they honest? Absolutely.