I met Rossella at the end of a pre-birth meeting (where she had accompanied a friend), which closed with a wish for the expectant mothers that they would find with their babies the same pleasure they had felt as little girls playing with their dolls. Leaving the room and walking past me, she gave me an unfriendly look and muttered, «if you'd had children, you'd know what a nightmare a new mother's life is!». Three days later she called me for an appointment: she had found out that I was a mother too, and she wanted to understand how to enjoy a new experience of motherhood, given how much of a burden the previous one had been for her.
We began a psychotherapy course that lasted several months and was then resumed after the birth of her second daughter. It was Rossella herself who asked me to help her share her experience, so that many mothers could understand that it's possible to fully enjoy a newborn, despite many moments of exhaustion and uncertainty, if one has the courage to face one's own history and to dig into those inner conflicts that would otherwise find in motherhood the ideal stage on which to be projected and repeated. The small precautions taken to keep her identity hidden take nothing away from the spontaneity of her account of her second experience of motherhood, which can be of help and encouragement to many mothers, or mothers-to-be, who anxiously wait for their children to grow up before they can enjoy them. If it's essential for the newborn to have a calm, unstressed mother nearby, it's equally true that being able to get to know and discover her baby with calm and awareness is, for the mother too, a pleasure and an enrichment of immeasurable value, one that women too often, unfortunately, deprive themselves of.