After the birth of her first son in 2015, Chelsea Conaboy’s overwhelming reaction was worry.
“It wasn’t just that I worried about his safety and well-being – though I certainly did. I also worried about the worry itself,” Conaboy said via phone last week. “I felt like it was crowding out these other feelings I was supposed to have.”
Weren’t new moms supposed to feel things like warmth and certainty? Where was this “maternal instinct” she’d heard so much about? A former Concord Monitor reporter and journalist all her life, Conaboy began looking into maternal anxiety and came across research regarding the changes in brain activity among new parents.
What she found especially striking was that these changes weren’t instant, and were not only driven by the hormonal shifts of pregnancy and childbirth. They were also caused by the exposure of a baby’s stimuli. She began contemplating how these changes can happen to all parents’ brains, not just mothers. It felt like a big story.
“I talked with friends and strangers about this topic. I felt so fascinated about it, and so amped up. Why weren’t we talking about this? Why didn’t I know about this before?” Conaboy said.
She picked away at the reporting, collecting research sporadically between work as a features editor at the Portland Press Herald and caring for her son. After the birth of her second child in 2017, Conaboy left her job due to childcare constraints and began freelancing full-time, which consequently gave her more bandwidth to focus on this project.
“There are some ideas that just stick with you. This was the case. It just felt really right, and I wasn’t seeing it written about in the way I wanted to write about it,” Conaboy said.
She wrote “Motherhood Brings the Most Dramatic Brain Changes of a Woman’s Life” for the Boston Globe Magazine in 2018, which went viral and became one of the magazine’s most-read stories that year. One of her mentors advised her to write a book proposal before somebody else did.
After securing a book contract, Conaboy delved into research for five months, spending time with the studies themselves and interviewing the people who conducted them. By the time she was ready to travel for her research, the pandemic hit, which significantly altered the trajectory of the project in terms of how she’d report and what form it would take.
But, in time, her big idea would turn into a book that’s garnered a great deal of buzz: Mother Brain: How Neuroscience is Rewriting the Story of Parenthood, which was released this September.
Unexpectedly, a major focus of the book became this idea of maternal instinct. It’s true, she says, that animals are fiercely protective of their children and that many human mothers are too. But she argues that this protective nature can’t really be called instinct.
“It comes through these transformative biological processes that are not always uniform. An instinct is a rigid idea, a fixed pattern or behavior. That’s the definition of it. The reality is, there’s much more variability both in animals and in humans. There are these deep profound biological changes that occur, but they’re just not what we’ve been told they are,” she said.
Conaboy has written or edited for The Portland Press Herald, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Concord Monitor. For the Globe, she was part of the staff that won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings, and for the Monitor, she was the reporter on the “Remember Me” project, a collaboration with photographer Preston Gannaway, who won a Pulitzer Prize for photography in 2008 for her work on this series.
For part of her career, Conaboy was a health reporter, which helped her learn to translate complicated topics for a general audience, but in most ways, writing Mother Brain was an entirely new experience. What motivated her most was the desire to get this information out to parents like herself.
“Much of the narrative around maternal instinct has been shaped by the perspective of men writing that theory in the early part of the 20th century,” she said. “I started feeling this research could not only change our individual experiences but also change the conversation around parenthood and the policies we do or don’t write for young families, particularly on things like paid leave, reproductive rights, and paid childcare. This old narrative has been so harmful, particularly to women over time, and science has a new story to tell.”
On her agenda now is keeping the momentum of the book going and sharing the message in as many ways as she can, from speaking engagements to a newsletter called Between Us, which contains stories and science of parenthood and its changing place in society. Eventually, she’ll start another project, hopefully one that also overlaps science and narrative writing.
Conaboy says she uses the skills she learned at the Monitor with everything she writes. She began at the paper as a recent grad of the University of New Hampshire’s journalism program and worked under Hans Schulz and Felice Belman, who she says taught her how to create depth in her storytelling.
“I feel like my time at the Monitor shaped me as a reporter in ways that I appreciate every day,” she said. “There’s such a culture there of deep, narrative storytelling – of getting to know people and sharing their stories, which has been so important to me.”
She speaks about Mother Brain at Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord, on Wednesday, Nov. 22, at 6:30 p.m.