Jessie Buckley dedicated her best actress Oscar win for Hamnet to the “beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart.” She was spot on.
Jessie Buckley was mid-acceptance speech at the 98th Academy Awards on Sunday night — Oscar for Best Actress in hand, the first Irish actress in history to hold one — when she said the line that cut through everything else: “I would like to dedicate this to the beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart.”
She won for Hamnet, Chloé Zhao’s film adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel, in which Buckley plays Agnes, wife to William Shakespeare, as the couple navigates the death of their 11-year-old son in 16th-century England. It is a film about grief, yes — but more precisely it is about a mother’s grief: raw, feral, resistant to language, and bigger than any stage Shakespeare ever wrote for. That Buckley delivered what critics are calling the performance of her career while privately longing to become a mother herself is not incidental.
On The New York Times‘ “Modern Love” podcast, Buckley described what it felt like to inhabit Agnes: “When I was filming Hamnet, I deeply wanted to become a mother,” the actress, 36, told the Times. “And it was such a gift to move through this woman and her motherhood and her love and her loss before I became a mother myself.” Filming wrapped in September 2024, and by her own account, she was pregnant days later. Her daughter Isla arrived eight months before Buckley stood at last night’s podium.
“Isla, my little girl who is eight months and has absolutely no idea what’s going on and is probably dreaming of milk, this is kind of a big deal,” she told the room. To her husband Freddie Sorensen, a mental health worker: “You are the most incredible dad, you’re my best friend and I want to have 20,000 more babies with you.” Addressing Zhao and O’Farrell she said that to get to know “this incandescent woman [in Agnes] and journey to understand the capacity of a mother’s love, is the greatest collision of my life.” Then came the dedication — to the beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart. The unguarded moment made a room full of polished people look, at least briefly, completely human.
The chaos and beauty of motherhood
The beautiful chaos is not a metaphor. And while it will mean something different for every mother, it actually has a name: matrescence — the developmental and psychological transition into motherhood. The term was coined in the 1970s by medical anthropologist Dana Raphael and was brought back into mainstream conversation by reproductive psychologist Dr. Alexandra Sacks, most notably through her widely shared New York Times essay “The Birth of a Mother” and a TED talk that followed and has more than 2.4 million views to date.
Sacks has argued that the shift into motherhood is among the most significant and underacknowledged developmental transitions a person can undergo, comparable in scope to adolescence. It is entirely normal, she has written, to feel “ambivalence, anger, regret, disappointment, love, tenderness, exhaustion, and frustration. Having these feelings doesn’t make you a bad mom, she argues, “it makes you human.”
Research published in Nature Mental Health frames it similarly, finding that the transition to motherhood involves significant biological, psychological, and interpersonal changes that require a reorganization of self-representations, emotional regulation, family roles, social networks, and work-life balance. The brain itself rewires during matrescence — gray matter reshapes to sharpen empathy and attunement. You become more permeable. Things reach you differently.
Rachel Cusk wrote in A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother that like all loves this one of becoming a parent is not merely “a taboo against complaint” that makes the hardship of motherhood inadmissible, but that it has a “conflicted core,” a “grain of torment that buffs the pearl of pleasure; unlike other loves, this conflict has no possibility of resolution.”
Buckley put it in her own terms during a November 2025 appearance on CBS News Sunday Morning: “It wakes you up to life.” And in an interview with Elle, she described the texture of it more precisely: “[children] give you these otherworldly little smiles and make your heart crack into a thousand pieces and you think, ‘Oh, it’s all going to be okay.'”
That crack — that is the chaos. Not disorder exactly, but a reconfiguration of self. The boundaries that once kept you intact become far more porous. The love arrives before language — and, as love often does, it resists explanation. The fear, though, too, arrives right alongside it, often stronger than anything experienced before it.
The reconfiguration hits differently depending on when you arrive at it. The further along you are in your own development when motherhood finds you, the more there is to reorganize, and the more vertiginous the process of becoming someone new. I became a mother at 41, after decades of building an identity that felt genuinely settled — career, perspective, a sense of self that had been tested enough to feel solid. What matrescence did to that was not add something on top of who I thought I was. It completely dismantled me — took apart the whole person I had been before my daughter arrived. A dozen years into this parenting thing and I’m only just starting to feel like bits and pieces of that person have started to return for good.
It’s not as if I wasn’t me all this time. But motherhood is so all-consuming. The busyness takes up physical time — the school drops, the lunches, the laundry, and the rest of it. But the loving takes up time in a far more abstract way. As my daughter gets older, I often feel like a piece of me is out in the world detached and alone, too far from home. It is like a disease, an affliction of the heart to be so biologically and emotionally invested in this way.
The part of motherhood no one really prepares you for
There is also the letting go.
Motherhood begins for most of us with holding on for dear life — and then as if in some cruel twist, we spend the rest of the journey slowly, incrementally, learning not to. Every developmental milestone is a small handing-over: the first steps as they amble away upright, the first day of school, the first time they don’t reach for your hand, the first time they choose their friends over you. Researchers describe this as a “progressive release” — one that can generate levels of anxiety parents didn’t anticipate, often surfacing as a kind of low-grade grief running beneath the joy. The love and the loss arrive together, always, it seems, inseparable.
Agnes’s grief in Hamnet is plague — the 16th century’s great, indiscriminate killer, offering no framework for prevention, no explanation a parent could give a child that might actually hold. The threats a mother now has to reckon with have names, which can make them feel even harder to absorb: Gun violence in classrooms. Floods that surge through summer camps before anyone can move. Fires driven by drought and wind that can erase a childhood’s geography in a single afternoon. War.
We understand more about what is coming for our children than Agnes ever could, but the gap between that knowledge and the ability to actually protect them is precisely where the chaos lives. Agnes is the extreme version of this — the irreversible, unthinkable loss of a child — and Buckley inhabited it with what Variety called a “near-shamanic” quality. NPR‘s Justin Chang says that at “some point,” Buckley doesn’t even seem to be acting anymore, “so effortlessly does she seem to inhabit Agnes’ earthy mysticism, her maternal love and her bottomless grief and despair. She’s the reason the film is as affecting as it is, especially at the climax, when we finally see how Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, and the first production of his play, Hamlet, converge.”
Variety‘s Peter Debruge says Buckley could be “the mother of us all” as “the grounded spirit forced to accept the death of her son.” That Buckley brought a soon-to-be mother’s body and emotional landscape to that performance — that she moved, as she told the “Modern Love” podcast, “through Agnes’ motherhood before becoming a mother herself” — makes what’s on screen something beyond craft.
“It’s every parent’s worst and most visceral fear that you will lose your child,” O’Farrell told The Guardian in 2020, years before the film existed, when asked what had kept her from writing the book for so long. “That — and the idea you couldn’t save them or weren’t able to safeguard them. I cannot imagine the agony of having to bury a child.”
What Buckley named from that podium is what most mothers are walking around carrying every day, without ceremony or audience. I think of my own daughter — 12 years old, nearly the same age as Hamnet when he died — growing up in a world that keeps asking more of her than it should. The beautiful chaos is everpresent: it’s a love large enough to reorganize everything around it and a fear that follows close behind; it’s the joy so acute it is nearly indistinguishable from vulnerability, and the knowledge that the whole project of parenthood is, at its core, a long negotiation between holding on tighter than you could ever imagine while also learning how to let go.
Watching Buckley say it last night, just eight months into motherhood herself — Isla presumably waiting for milk somewhere in the building — I felt the pull of motherhood in the way that never changes. The “chaos” she called out does not belong only to new mothers (or Oscar stages or novels about Elizabethan grief). It is carved into the heart of anyone who has ever loved a child so completely that the love itself becomes indistinguishable from grief. Chaos indeed. And, like Buckley noted, it is also, undeniably, the most beautiful thing there is.
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