«Today, at the antenatal class I started attending rather early, we covered a topic I had never thought about before: the embryo is a foreign body to the mother! The egg cell, from which the baby develops, has a genetic makeup different from the mother's who hosts it, because it's a mix of the father's and the mother's. It's a bit like a transplant, a graft, and as such it is subject to a rejection response from the mother's cells, which perceive it as foreign.
It's a biological reaction, but one that explains why some women, in early pregnancy, feel an unpleasant sensation of being invaded.
The explanation for all this is a bit complicated for someone like me who knows nothing about biology. So I tried to picture what happens through an image: it may not be very scientific, but it «gets the idea across» for me. I imagined a tiny, miniature baby (the embryo) clinging to a rocky wall (the maternal uterus) while a storm tries to sweep it away (the mother's natural killer cells) because it's a stranger in this environment. The storm dies down if the little one manages to send out a signal that makes the environment recognize it, as if to say: I'm part of you, don't throw me away!
Its survival, then, depends on the interaction of two factors: the intensity of the storm (that is, the mother's reaction) and the strength with which it clings on. None of this has anything to do with whether the mother feels accepting or not, so much so that women who desire a baby most intensely often miscarry, while those who don't want one but don't have the courage to terminate the pregnancy carry it to term! It's a natural, physiological reaction that every human being goes through in their own mother's womb and repeats as a mother when she herself becomes pregnant. What varies from person to person is the intensity of these survival-related events (which are therefore neutral, neither good nor bad) that remain etched into our cells and form the basis of aggression.
After the first few weeks from fertilization, I understood that a modus vivendi is established between the maternal body and the embryo that allows survival: it's as if the embryo comes to be regarded as a set of maternal cells, becoming one with the mother, just like an organ, a part of herself, from which she will separate at birth.»
These reflections, expressed by Lara in such simple, understandable terms, are essential to understanding that every mother/embryo interaction is characterized by attempts at mutual dominance, which vary in intensity from pair to pair depending on individual characteristics.
The physiological struggle for survival that characterizes the dawn of every human life thus shapes the course of pregnancy and leaves indelible traces in the unconscious of the future individual.
That the mother-child relationship isn't made only of love and tenderness, as one might imagine before actually living it, is something every mother who's honest with herself knows well: even toward the most beloved of children she can sometimes feel strong emotions of aggression, of not being able to bear it any longer. Knowing where these feelings come from, and learning to recognize them, helps manage them without consequences for the child and without guilt, but with the awareness that they are part of our human nature.