«When I realized I was pregnant, I could hardly believe it: I had wanted a baby for so long, and it kept not happening even though I'd stopped taking the pill months before. Once I had a rather long delay in my period and I really let myself believe it, especially since the pregnancy test had come back positive. What a disappointment I felt the next day, finding out my period had come after all! For a while I lived with anxiety and tension as my period approached, and when it arrived, it left me with a deep sense of discouragement. I was afraid I wasn't able to have a baby, that I was different from other women: sterile, unwell. I even asked my gynecologist to run some tests, but wisely he advised me to wait a bit longer. In his opinion, I was simply very tense and living my desire for a child so intensely that something inside me was blocking it, preventing it from happening. I got pregnant when I stopped obsessing over it. I let myself be distracted, my mind was occupied with several other things: an interesting new activity I had started throwing myself into with great enthusiasm, and an exciting trip to India, a country I had wanted to visit for a long time. I was so far from imagining that the long-awaited event had finally happened that, when I started feeling nauseous, I didn't even consider the possibility that I might be expecting a baby. I thought I had picked up some kind of food poisoning during the trip, so much so that I went to see the doctor. Needless to say how happy I felt when, after listening to a detailed description of my symptoms, he suggested I take a pregnancy test and book an appointment with my gynecologist, because, in his opinion, my symptoms were those of a pregnant woman.»
Fulfilling the desire to become pregnant takes a very different amount of time from one woman to another (and even, for the same woman, from one pregnancy to the next): a length of time that gets called endless, even though it rarely truly is.
During this period of «waiting to wait», more or less intense fears of sterility can arise, making a woman worry that she may be unable to conceive and pushing her to move from one gynecologist to another, from one test to the next, hoping to find some treatment that will let her reach her goal as quickly as possible.
Temporary sterility, however, is often due not so much to organic factors as to psychic conflicts one isn't aware of, because they date back to a forgotten childhood period. In particular, they can be linked to aggression felt toward one's mother and, as a consequence, to the fear of her revenge (as if the wronged mother were preventing her daughter from becoming a mother in turn), or to guilt over childhood masturbation, as if it had somehow damaged the reproductive organs.
As often happens, for Lara too the pregnancy begins right when the wait for a baby becomes less desperate. As if protecting herself from yet another disappointment, Lara is caught off guard by what's happening in her body, and doesn't even recognize the symptoms, until it's the doctor who reveals to her the secret she, deep down, already knew well.
This situation occurs in many pregnancies, since many women often need someone else's recognition to authorize and make their condition real. This helps explain the enormous importance the gynecologist holds throughout pregnancy: by confirming her condition, he makes it real, an object of often contradictory feelings, among which joy, hope, fear, anxiety, anger, or non-acceptance tend to prevail. Onto this figure, who may show the mother-to-be a trusting, encouraging attitude, or, on the contrary, an authoritarian and coercive one, are projected the feelings, expectations, and fears that the pregnant woman, still in some sense a child herself, once experienced toward her own parents. The doctor-patient relationship that forms thus reactivates childhood experiences of satisfaction and/or frustration, and is therefore particularly charged with emotional investment.