The soundtrack of matrescence
Interview with Claire Tonti
I chat with singer-songwriter Claire Toni on her debut album ‘Matrescence’. Together we discuss Claire’s experience of matrescence, creativity as a window to ourselves, and reclaiming artistry as mothers.
At the core of this conversation, we explore the power of creativity to share the collective story of motherhood.
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About Claire
Claire Tonti is a singer-songwriter and mother of two little humans, 2 and 7. She is also CEO of the media company Planet Broadcasting and host of two podcasts - the award-winning recommendations show Suggestible and her interview show TONTS. where she celebrates women’s stories - talking to writers, experts, thinkers and deeply feeling humans about their lives. In February 2023, Claire released her debut album Matrescence. A collection of 11 intimate indie folk songs that explore the complexities of mothering, overcoming birth trauma, love, loss & identity, touring here, in the UK & Ireland.
We explore the following questions:
How did you come to write an album about matrescence?
How does your work respond to the experience of thinking, “Am I the only one?”
How did songwriting help you to understand what you were going through and connect with people?
What do you feel might be next for you?
Where can people learn more about your work?
Additional resources we spoke about:
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Transcript
Julia Jones:
Hello and welcome to Newborn Mothers Podcast. Today we have a very special guest, Claire Tonti, who is a singer-songwriter and also a podcaster. Claire and I met at a creative business retreat and really connected because we both talk a lot about motherhood in our work, and I know that's definitely informed your work. Claire's first album is out now and it's called Matrescence, which probably says it all.
Claire Tonti:
Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here.
How did you come to write an album about matrescence?
Julia Jones:
I'm very happy to have you. Do you want to introduce yourself a little bit and how you came to writing an album about matrescence?
Claire Tonti:
I've got two little kids, three and he's eight now, so a boy and a girl. The start of 2022, I had a baby during the pandemic, my daughter, I've been running a podcast business with my husband, and I just became really unwell with long COVID. I think I had postnatal depletion as well, which is a funny road into why I started writing an album, but I think a lot of mums can relate to this, I just had nothing left in the tank.
Since I had my son, well, he's eight now, eight years ago, I'd experienced quite a lot of birth trauma, now I know in hindsight, and some perinatal mental health struggles through that too, but I just sort of pushed it down and kept working and kept building this business. I used to be a teacher before that, so I was just running through my adrenaline stores, I think, as well.
At the start of 2022, when I got long COVID, I couldn't even watch TV. The light was too bright, I just hit the lowest point probably I've been, and I started resting a lot. That was all I could really do. I started seeing a naturopath and my GP and they just said, "Look, parent, and that's probably all you can do." And I had to stop working, which was just so unlike me. I'm usually really busy.
Because of that, I started having a lot of time to think just in that stillness. Other than in parenting, I couldn't do anything else, and so, I started remembering what I loved most about creativity and myself really, was when I was in my 20s and I was singing. I had developed this cough because of long COVID, and as a podcaster, you can't really have a cough while you're interviewing people. So, I lied to myself I think, and said, "I'll get a singing teacher as something gentle and restorative to do just for me for the first time in years, and she might help me with my cough and give me some breathing techniques."
I went to see her, her name is Bianca, and she started helping me to develop my voice and work on some breath work. Then in that stillness when I was resting a lot after the kids had gone to bed, I started songwriting. I put one song on Instagram and she saw it and she said to me, "You're a songwriter, did you know, and what are you going to do with it?"
I said, "I'm not, and I barely have any energy in the tank to do the parenting I need to do and show up for my family." But then she reminded me, and I think it's so true that as mothers we often put everyone else's needs before our own. Actually, creativity seems like it should be the lowest priority, but actually, it can be the thing that can ultimately be really healing and help us to find a little window of time into ourselves.
That first song I wrote was called This Mother Thing. The other thing actually, I should say, before all of that as well, I went to a Kindred Women's Circle that my friend Erin was running, it's the first time I'd ever been to a women's circle, and she gave us journals and said, "Write down something you want to call into your life."
In that journal I wrote, "I want to bring in music." Then on the next page are the first lyrics to my song. This is skipping ahead, but over the course of that year, I was connected with a music producer called Ezekiel. Then we started developing these songs and it quickly became 11 songs, some of which two I'd written in my early 20s, and I re imagined for this record, but I had no idea that I was going to perform them anywhere or release them as an album.
I didn't think I was writing an album about motherhood, I just thought I was writing an album about what I felt. It's so strange now to look back at it because each song has kind of an aspect of the struggles that women go through, the women in my life I could see going through as well as myself around identity and birth trauma and figuring out how to be this person.
Then I was googling around for something to call it and just stumbled on the word matrescence. I had no idea about any of it. It was really new to me when we met at that retreat. I just saw the definition, the process of becoming a mother. It kind of blew my mind because I hadn't realized it was actually a world of activists and people who were really interested in the scientific theory behind what happens when we become mothers.
Then when I started looking at those themes and that word and the work of some people like Amy Taylor-Kabbaz and even yourself too, in the conversations we had at that retreat, I suddenly realized that this music I'd been writing was that exact thing. The way that my brain had changed, my body, my heart, my spirit, my perspective on the world, that kind of all consuming love you have your kids. There's a song there called Lullaby, which I wrote as a love letter to my kids that came out really quickly, in 20 minutes, but it's about wanting to accept them for who they are. They don't have to be perfect or good, I'll just love them always.
But then the flip side of that motherhood journey, where in This Mother Thing, there's a lyric in there that says, "Will you go but also stay, will you grow but also never change?" and that, to me, in a nutshell is the complexity of motherhood. It's like this all consuming love and exhaustion, and can you also leave me alone so I can do some stuff by myself? Then you do that and then you miss them, and then you worry that you're not good enough. It's so layered, I just think there should be whole giant cathedrals dedicated to art made by women at this time because it's so rich in complexity.
How does your work respond to the experience of thinking “Am I the only one?”
Julia Jones:
What is such an interesting observation for me having hundreds of these conversations is that so many mothers have that experience that you had where it just pours out of them. They live that experience and then they realize that everyone else is experiencing that too.
But that just shows you how much as a society and as a culture, we don't really embrace those voices. We really diminish that experience of motherhood and don't really allow it to be heard because everyone has that experience and goes, "Am I the only one?"
Claire Tonti:
It's so true. I think that's something I really noticed, what I thought was just my stuff, particularly around, for me, I wrote a song called Self, which is about birth trauma and breastfeeding challenges and the expectations of others. I was so shocked by the way I was treated in the system, but I thought it was me. I thought it was just me, that I couldn't breastfeed.
I tried so hard and the advice that I got from everyone was, "Just keep feeding, just try harder, you should be better at this. Feed every two hours, then pump, then give them formula. He's not putting on weight. Well, it must be your fault." When I said, "Well, when do I sleep?" The advice was kind of, "Well, you don't, you just push through it until it works, and it will," because the terrible parenting advice that I got through the hospital when I did my birthing classes that first time around was, "All women can breastfeed, some can't hack the pain."
As a good student, I remember writing it down at 29, I had no other friends who had kids. So, I just thought if I'd try as hard as I can, of course it will work. As I know now, there are a million different ways that women end up feeding their babies. There's a million different reasons why it can be challenging. I now know there's a thing called hyperplasia, which means you might not have enough memory tissue to produce enough milk. Your baby's mouth might not be the right shape. There's so many different factors that go into it, your mental health as well, and also depletion.
So, because I'd experienced such significant birth trauma, I'd lost so much blood, I was so iron deficient, but no one picked any of that up. I thought that was me, and then when I sing that song and the lyric is, "But I'm bleeding, just try harder, you should be better at it all. Here, take all this shame." The amount of women who in the audience just burst into tears, or write to me afterwards and say, "Yeah, that was me. I thought it was just me. And I tried and no one said, 'Actually, formula will be fine if that's what you need to do for you.'"
Or just wrap you up in this cocoon of love, which I really admire in your work. It's that caring for this newborn mother, this woman is just as new to this role as this baby is, and you need to be wrapped rather than kind of told you're not doing it well enough and isolated. In hindsight now, when I sing that song, the last lyric is about that ‘this shame isn't yours to hold, your body's born this way, you were beautiful and wonderfully made’. That's the message that I want all women and all parents, whoever you are, to know that you are wonderful, however your parenting goes in that journey. We just need much more love and understanding and compassion for women. Because the first lyric to that song is, "Woman at the start broken open now, thinking that she's failed."
I now know one in three women experience birth trauma in Australia, but I didn't know that statistic at the time. I will say too, and this is part of the story I tell in my show because I performed this for the first time in February this year to 200 people, having not performed in 15 years and I was so nervous. At the end I just burst into tears, everyone stood up and gave me a standing ovation and I was crying and they were crying and there were midwives in the room and women who'd supported each other through their own births and women who I've been parenting through the pandemic with as well. We all just collectively were just laughing and weeping about what we'd all been through.
I don't even know where I'm going with this, I'm rambling now. It just made me realize that I'm in no way alone and that we need to be doing better for mothers where we find ourselves in this culture now. It's not just here, I ended up touring the UK as well this year, and through Scotland and into Ireland, and mothers all over the place and healthcare professionals, midwives, doulas were all saying the same, that there was a lot happening in the system that affected women so greatly.
I would say too, I've met so many amazing midwives and doulas, but part of the reason I had birth trauma was that when I started laboring, I was in the hospital setting and I started singing into the pain. As a singer, I'd repress that part of me, but obviously my body, as we know, is very wise, and I now know that helps with the vagal nerve and opening you up, right? Your cervix actually looks a lot like your vocal cords if you see them in diagrams.
I started singing and this woman, this midwife, who, I'm sure she thought she was doing the right thing, told me to be quiet and get back on the bed and stop making so much noise and you'll exhaust yourself. Then what happened to me in that really fragile moment is my body shut down. I shut down and I felt really ashamed of the sound I was making, and I often think how different it would've been if I'd been able to sing my son into the world.
Instead it was a pretty traumatic kind of entry for him and I ended up with quite a lot of injuries. It's something I'm really passionate about now, the music, and I found so much joy in it, but also in this work of supporting and just talking more about why it's important that we give more mothers love through that process.
Julia Jones:
Can I just remind you a little bit, what was it that the hospital said to you? Everyone can breastfeed...
Claire Tonti:
Some can't hack the pain.
Julia Jones:
Some can't hack the pain, which is such a reflection of our cultural attitude really, isn't it? To everything, to birth, to mothering, just put up with it, get on with it, stop complaining.
I think when you were saying that people do genuinely have some... Sometimes there are genuine biological challenges around breastfeeding, but why we know that this is actually not an individual shame, it should actually be a societal shame, is because other countries don't have breastfeeding rates like ours. Some countries have breastfeeding rates of 30%, 50%, and some people have breastfeeding rates of 90 or 98%.
There's very few women who couldn't breastfeed. It's not that they can't hack the pain, that's not the problem. The problem is they're not given the right support, they're traumatized, they're lonely, no one's teaching them how. These are all learned skills, and they also take a lot of time and energy, which you don't have if you've just lost lots of blood, you're experiencing depression, you haven't got anyone else who knows how to breastfeed showing you how.
We really need to change that narrative that it's an individual choice to thinking of it as a social responsibility. If so many women are struggling to breastfeed, what are we as a society doing wrong?
Claire Tonti:
It's true. I do also think that there is genetically as well, some women are gifted with more milk than others. I do genuinely see that. Just anecdotally, I'm not an expert, but I can see that some of my friends can fill whole fridges, and I spent hours and hours and hours trying and getting 10 ml worth of milk.
Julia Jones:
Yes, but how much you pump is not reflective of how much your baby's getting. That's again, a really common misconception because we trust machines and bottles more than we trust our own bodies and our babies, but babies are much more efficient at the breast than breast pumps. So, the fact that you can't pump much doesn't mean that your baby's not able to drink much. It can be completely unrelated.
So, there's just so much that undermines our feelings about women's bodies that we just have this basic assumption that they're wrong or broken or that they won't work, rather than the basic assumption that if we cared for mums, if they were healthy and happy and supported, it would be a lot easier. A lot easier.
Claire Tonti:
Definitely.
How did songwriting help you to understand what you were going through and connect with people?
Julia Jones:
Tell us about how that experience of songwriting helped you to understand what you were going through and connect with people because that sounds like a really big part of that journey for you.
Claire Tonti:
Do you mean connecting with other mothers, after I wrote it?
Julia Jones:
It's an experience that you realise that everyone else is having similar feelings.
Claire Tonti:
I released the first single Fear to Feel, which is really fun and it's about desire, and I made a video clip for it back where I lived when I was in my 20s. It's kind of about sex and going to a house party and wondering if the person that you are into is there, and I filmed it in my brother's flat. That's a really fun song. It's also got this thrum of a snare drum in it, which is like a thrum of desire. So, I released that in December, nothing to do with motherhood, and lots of people wrote to me and were like, "That's so cool, I really enjoyed that." I've got a podcast called TONTS where I interview women and diverse voices, and another one I do with my husband called Suggestible, so lots of those listeners were reaching out. It was super fun.
But then, the rest of the album I decided to release in February as a whole piece because I wanted it to tell that full story of a transition from that girl in her 20s through motherhood. The themes in it are things like relationship breakdown, there's All Kinds of Lovely, which is this really joyful song about how I see my kids when they walk into a room. There's songs in there, one's called Thread, which has lots of different things and it's quite mysterious, but I think really is about everyone watching you as a mother and keeping score and you feeling like you're being constantly judged in a way, and I've touched on other songs in there as well.
What I think, once I released it all, happened, was it started with the women in my community and my friends who listened to it and wrote to me and just said, "I felt so seen." One of my friends said that to me, a few, actually. "I cried through the whole thing and I feel so seen." That blew me away, and I just thought, "Well, that's lovely." I made this for me, but the fact that that's made other women feel seen is really beautiful.
But then when I released it in February and did that live show that I talked about, the reaction just blew me away. I was not prepared for that at all, having not sung in so long, and then just sitting with friends of mine afterwards, one of the things in it is, A, how much we love our kids, but B, how much women lose their identity and aren't sure of who they are anymore.
That piece of that understanding that actually it takes seven to eight years to move through matrescence so your brain is different, you are different. If we are told that before we go into it, at least we'd have some heads up. Like adolescents, we're expected to not know what's going on, we're expected to have all these heightened emotions and not know what we want to wear anymore and our bodies doing things we don't understand. A lot of women kind of resonated with that too because that had blown my mind when I found out about the word matrescence.
Then the other thing that happened was that people started saying to me, "I used to be a dancer, and I loved it, and now I don't do it." Or, "I used to write and I write poetry, but I never told anyone or shown anyone." That's probably the biggest piece for me, other than people feeling seen in those songs and the pain they've been through being recognized, it's also understanding that as a mother, you're allowed to be creative. You're allowed to find something that lights you up, you're allowed to have space just for you.
There's a beautiful book called The Divided Heart where creative mothers talk about what it's like to have kids and also make art. Often, in our culture, I think we can feel guilty about taking that time for ourselves. But actually now, so many women I've met who are creatives talk about that kind of joy of sneaking away to do it, or their kids seeing them as a whole person making something. I've found that there's been that reaction too, that women in my life have gone back to dancing or back to writing or also back to singing or going to get guitar lessons or pottery or whatever it is, because I think creativity is really undervalued as a way of caring for our mental health as mothers.
That's been really beautiful. I've ended up in regional Victoria singing to women in community halls, and then I got invited to go to London, and so I did that tour. I did, what is it, 11 shows across three weeks, and then a show in Sydney. A woman, Ariane Beeston, who's releasing a book this year on perinatal psychosis and her story, she's also a beautiful contemporary dancer and a psychologist, and she sent me a video of her dancing to my song Self over Instagram, and it just blew me away.
So, then we performed together...in July in Sydney, which is so special to have that connection, sort of an artist meeting the other artist, even for me to say that I'm an artist is really wild to me, but it's just been the biggest joy. So, I know I've just rambled away, but that's, I think, the thing that I've loved the most about making this music, is seeing other women's art and creativity popping out in all different ways.
Julia Jones:
Not just seeing but encouraging as well. I think it's really... It's kind of sad, I guess, that we live in a culture where you sort of need permission to do your art. I always think when we were back in hunter-gatherer cultures, we would've made everything with our hands, it wouldn't have been a separate part of life. You would've just been weaving and carving throughout your day to do everything. Now it's seen as something that's a bit self-indulgent or unproductive, and so, we kind of need to be encouraged to do that again.
Claire Tonti:
I completely agree. I also think people, particularly around singing and music, we have this weird culture of competitiveness and productivity, and it has to be because it's going to be the best album or you're the best singer. Even shows like The Voice, it's pitting people who sing against each other and saying, "Well, you're the winner, you're the one that gets to do this." When actually, I went to Fiji last year with my family and they're all just singing and playing bad guitar as we turn up because just as we walk, just as we run, just as we eat, just as we sleep, we also all have a voice that sings and vibrates and we all feel really good using that.
It's so good for our vagal nerve to do mantras and meditation. It doesn't matter whether or not anyone else thinks it's any good, it should just be a way of being in the world and I think that about things with our hands as well. We're creative beings at heart, so part of our mental health struggles too, is that block around creativity and just generating things rather than screens all the time.
I definitely think, for me, that was the reason why I stopped singing. I did classical training in my early years and AMEB exams, and that's great for some people, but for me, I felt like the whole focus was on the wrong notes. So, if you got the note wrong, then you throw the rest of the song away, you are not good enough, maybe we'll give you a B or a C, rather than just focusing on the joy and the love of it and the collaborative kind of approach to music, which I think we should have more of.
Because so many people say to me, "Oh, I love singing, but I can't sing." But that's just an oxymoron. Everyone can sing. I mean, some people maybe have a voice that people want to listen to more than others, but also, it doesn't matter. We should be just doing it because it feels good rather than whether or not, I don't know, you'd win Australian Idol.
Julia Jones:
I totally agree. For my book I interviewed some Nunga elders here and asked them about some of their birthing and postpartum traditions, and one of the things that the women mentioned to me was that they would sing. I was like, "What would you sing?" and she's like, "Oh, we don't have a written song. We just sing as we're working." We'd be like, "We're digging a hole, we're digging a hole. We're feeding the baby, we're feeding the baby." It wasn't like a scripted performative thing. It was just like, "Oh, we just sing what we're doing all the time."
Claire Tonti:
I love that. Oh my God, that is me to a tee, my poor family, I just love singing. If life would be a musical, there's an episode in Scrubs where it's just a musical, they wake up and everyone has to sing to each other, it's my favorite thing. Because it's a way of understanding the world. That's how I see it anyway. Language, to me, is the same, just talking it out and it's all in the moment then, and it's not wrong or right.
That culture, our First Nation culture of being really present doesn't surprise me at all. I worked up in the Kimberley's in a community there and there were chairs under trees everywhere overturned. For a while I was like, "Could someone just clean these chairs up, it's really making a bit of a mess." Then I realised it was just because culturally, the community would follow the sun, and so they just wanted to have chairs wherever they could, under trees or wherever, so that whenever they needed to sit down, they could, to chat.
It's that being in the moment and in the stillness, which I think is, to me, why those songs came to me when I was really still too, because how much do we really get to do that in this culture of fast-paced, always have to be occupied. Whereas I felt, to me, songwriting is like a spiritual process. It's meditative. The songs kind of come sometimes fully formed, sometimes not, but there's a quietness to songwriting that is so sacred to me actually, for want of a better word. It's like my spiritual practice. It's a way of understanding and processing what I'm going through, whether or not anyone hears it is another thing.
What do you feel might be next for you?
Julia Jones:
Without putting any pressure to be productive on you, I'm wondering what you feel might be next?
Claire Tonti:
That's a good question. I'm writing another album. I'm taking my time with this one. My friend Sean said to me the difficult second album, but I think it's more a case of wanting to spend the time with it. I'm also working next year on touring my show more, so I do the show as a complete 11 songs with storytelling. I'm playing next year at Newcastle Fringe Festival.
I'm planning some more fringe festivals and some more shows in regional Victoria. I'm currently working with a music therapist to develop a workshop where we do a couple of my songs as journal prompts and she teaches melodic mantras, and we do those with babies and mums because a lot of what I'm trying to do is develop shows that are accessible for mothers, so three o'clock on a Sunday afternoon seems to be a really good time. It's outside of kids' sport and times where families can come and you can bring your baby, but it's not a kid show. It's a show where they might enjoy the music, but you'll get something out of it too, because it's storytelling, as well as singing about motherhood.
I often have art supplies around as well, so sometimes women will end up drawing during the show because I don't like to sit still all the time, and they always have seats available and accessible bathrooms. Often the music industry, your favorite artist might not come on until 10 o'clock at night, so I'm trying to develop shows like that, which I did this year.
That's me for next year is more shows of Matrescence, writing a new album, working on a new season of my show TONTS because I couldn't do it this year after all the touring and parenting. But I think the biggest challenge for me, and I don't know if anyone else resonates with this, is not burning out, not overdoing it. I'm trying to learn that lesson. I think I didn't really learn it that well this year, so I'm trying not to take on... As someone who runs their own business, I'm sure you can relate to this, the balance of wanting to really do a good job and all the ideas that you've got, you want them to come to fruition, but also, I don't want to end up exhausted and all of that. They're the things I'm currently working on.
Julia Jones:
That's definitely a big part of what we teach in the postpartum education and care professional training we have 12 modules and one of them is on sustainability, making sure that we're doing this work in a way that means we can keep doing this work.
I think that's very common, particularly for mothers to feel like it's a bit all or nothing rather than, "Why don't we just do a little bit of this and a little bit of that and the pace will be a bit slower, but we'll be around for a long time."
Claire Tonti:
That's 100%. I actually am really excited. I think this time around I'm going to release songs as individual stories, and one of the songs I've written is on miscarriage, so I experienced one in between my two kids. I have this kind of dream I'm working on at the moment of crafting it to have a big group of women singing it with me. I'm spending more time planning out instrumentation and working on... because just, I guess more themes around motherhood and conversations that I don't necessarily think we always have or talk about.
I think expressing them in art and in music is another beautiful way of entering into something maybe in a gentler way, I don't know, or a different way anyway. I think there's so much power in art to be able to do that. I'm kind of excited for doing that, but not rushing it, taking my time. It should be good.
Where can people learn more about your work?
Julia Jones:
I love it, that's beautiful. So if people want to learn more about you, they can go to clairetonti.com We'll pop the links up in the show notes. Is there anything else you want to close with?
Claire Tonti:
Just thank you so much for having me, it's been really beautiful. Instagram is my social media of choice, so there's clairetonti.com or @clairetonti and you can find me on Spotify as well. All of my album, actually, you can purchase it as a digital download from my site directly, and there's a digital lyrics booklet that my friend Annabelle Warren created for me. Each song has an artwork and a symbol to go with it. This Mother Thing has the lotus flower, and you can see the front cover design too, is me with an open heart. That digital lyrics booklet is really special, particularly if you're someone that works in the motherhood space. Quite a lot of women that I know are now using my songs as journal prompts or playing them in their women's circles and in their sessions with mothers.
I have a friend who's also a masseuse that works a lot with mothers, and she plays some of the music too. It's got kind of ambient sound in the background, so there's different tools that you can use the music for. The other one is Lullaby. There's a woman I met in Exeter who uses it to put her little baby to sleep because it has rain on the roof in the background of it. It's the original voice memo that I created it for, so she finds it puts her daughter to sleep. So, if you need another strategy, you could always give that a go.
Other than that, I'd love to see you at a show if anyone's listening and is curious, I might be around in your area, so there's an events page at Claire Tonti, and reach out if you would like me to come and play at a women's circle or a retreat or a workshop. I've started doing that too, and I'd love to, so you can contact me on Instagram is the best way, I think.
Julia Jones:
Beautiful, thanks so much for sharing with us, Claire.
