The wish for a child doesn't begin at the moment of conception: every woman experiences it, more or less consciously, from earliest childhood (even though she may only fulfill or avoid it as an adult), and expresses it through playing with dolls, or refusing to. A woman who becomes pregnant erases the span of time, longer or shorter, that separates her from the little girl she once was, and lives out, at the same time, the two roles that characterized her childhood: on one hand, she becomes again the little girl who plays with a doll, imitating her mother; on the other, she is the one who, through the doll, expresses certain intimate desires of her own, particularly those she doesn't dare show in real life.
Pregnancy (without the woman being aware of it) reawakens deep desires typical of childhood, which until then had lain dormant. Their fulfillment, which should normally be indirect and disguised, often disregards the demands imposed by the reality the woman lives in, and happens directly, through behavior that would be irrational and out of place in an adult, but perfectly understandable in a small child. These situations, typical of pregnancy and common to most pregnant women, are experienced with greater or lesser intensity depending on each woman's history and character.
This is what Lara tells us, a young pregnant woman expecting her first child, who will share with us, throughout her pregnancy and the postpartum period, how her inner world evolves.
She is calm, happy to be becoming a mother; she uses her quiet moments to think back on different times in her past life, in which she finds the same feelings, the same desires and fantasies she's experiencing now. Without realizing it, these thoughts help her face and work through the irreversible changes that having a child will bring to her life. Bringing a child into the world is, in fact, an irreversible step that involves, alongside a series of practical issues, above all major shifts in emotional investment, which can sometimes upset the balance of the woman, the man, and the couple.
«I don't know how long I've wanted a child; I think forever, ever since, as a little girl, whenever someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I'd answer «the mother of lots of children». I loved newborns very much for how fragile and vulnerable they looked; they seemed to me so in need of affection, warmth, and tenderness! My little cousin, for instance, won me over the very first time I saw him, with his big dark eyes staring at me, perhaps without even seeing me: he was only a little bigger than my baby doll, but when he cried, he screamed so loudly and turned so red in the face that I was amazed and, at the same time, frightened, because I was afraid he would suffocate.
I was only five, but with him I felt grown up and sensible. Unfortunately the adults didn't trust me very much, they wouldn't let me hold him in my arms as much as I wanted, and above all they wouldn't let me give him his bottle or change him, or give him all that motherly care that so attracted me.
My mother would console me by telling me to be patient. My turn to look after my own children would come too, and she hoped I would keep the same enthusiasm. For her, raising my sister and me can't always have been an easy, pleasant task. In fact, she sometimes tells me that, when my father was away on business trips, anxiety and exhaustion kept her from even enjoying the happy moments she appreciated so much when she was calm and rested. I think that, unfortunately, the memory of the hardship has stayed more vivid in her mind than that of the joy of motherhood, as happens to so many women who went through any kind of difficulty during that time.»