«Being pregnant feels wonderful and unbelievable at the same time. I willingly accept the symptoms, even the nausea of the first weeks: it's a physical state that lets me realize I'm really expecting a baby. In fact, on the days when I feel fine, I almost get worried. I start to doubt that something in my pregnancy isn't proceeding normally. Usually the symptoms start the moment I wake up, with a feeling of nausea at any kind of food: even the things I liked most before pregnancy now disgust me, so much so that sometimes I end up skipping meals altogether. But the situation doesn't improve, because on an empty stomach the urge to vomit becomes even more unbearable; and yet I try to hold back, as if I were afraid to let go. Once, while I was forcing myself to eat a slice of meat, I couldn't control it anymore and started vomiting. I don't remember anything else about that moment: for an instant that felt like an eternity, it seemed as if I'd lost all contact with the outside world. I found myself lying on a sofa, sweaty and shaken, with my husband beside me trying to reassure me. The very thing I feared, and had until then considered unbearable, had happened, and yet it left me with a feeling of relief, of release, so much that I wondered why I always tried so hard not to vomit. Maybe to force myself to fast all day? Like so many pregnant women, was I also afraid that gaining weight would ruin my figure for good?
The fear of vomiting brings back many childhood memories in which vomiting was a recurring symptom. As a child I suffered from bouts of acetonemia and was supposed to follow a fairly strict diet. I was so greedy and gluttonous that I refused to admit certain foods were bad for me, so much so that I would eagerly eat them in secret so as not to get caught. I remember, for instance, that if I knew there were sweets in the house, I would search everywhere while my mother was out and, if I found them, I'd eat them all without any restraint. Of course, in the end I would throw up and be forced to confess my mischief. The worst part was that, on top of feeling physically ill, I also got scolded by my mother, who, instead of giving me the loving care I would have wanted, scolded me because I deserved it!
Vomiting was thus both the expression of my guilt and my punishment: it left me with a headache, a strong sense of weakness, and above all a very irritated mother, because I had disobeyed again.»
It's interesting to note that, for Lara, a typical pregnancy symptom is linked to a «compromise» situation that takes her back to childhood. Back then, vomiting was the expression of a desire (eating sweets) and of the guilt she felt whenever she disobeyed the ban on doing so.
Trying to hold back from vomiting during pregnancy thus becomes a way of avoiding those same feelings of guilt from the past, which made her feel in conflict with her mother.
For a woman, a good relationship with her mother (understood not only as the mother in the present but, above all, as the maternal image she carries within herself) is essential both for becoming pregnant and for carrying the pregnancy to term in a calm, physiological way.