Academy of Film and Creative Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University
Abstract
This article explores pregnancy as an embodied contradiction, where the maternal body is experienced simultaneously as self and other. A personal account of pregnancy in China is used as a situated example to consider how cultural frameworks, medical institutions, and historical narratives shape maternal experience, often amplifying feelings of estrangement and ambivalence. The discussion examines the tension between dominant discourses that idealize motherhood and the lived realities of bodily expropriation, discomfort, and resistance. Personal narrative is placed in dialogue with historical perspectives and cultural discourses to critique the silences surrounding maternal ambivalence and to expose the inadequacy of available language to convey pregnancy as lived experience. The article argues that attention to these contradictions opens new ways of understanding motherhood as both a cultural construction and an embodied reality.
Before the Beginning
I spent my entire adolescence terrified of getting pregnant, convinced it would ruin my life. I grew up in a country where abortion was, and still is, illegal. For me and my friends, pregnancy meant the end: the end of a career, the end of independence, the end of youth, the end of life as we knew it, the end of possibility. The fear was so overwhelming that when I eventually chose to have children in my thirties, I had to reeducate myself. I had spent so many years avoiding pregnancy that I didn’t even know how to want it. And when I did get pregnant, and hated every second of it, I was overwhelmed by guilt. Everything I had absorbed from films, advertisements, and the smiling faces on prenatal vitamin boxes told me that pregnancy was supposed to be sweet. That pregnant women are meant to be docile and glowing, in love with their unborn children. Even now, despite a growing number of honest accounts from women describing nausea, exhaustion, and a deep sense of alienation from their own bodies, the dominant narrative remains unchanged: if you suffer, do it quietly. To complain is to seem ungrateful. To resist is to betray your role.
Explaining motherhood to someone else is like trying to scratch their itch. You can guess the spot, but you never quite reach it. It is a bodily experience, imprecise and unsharable, something that must be felt to be understood. Like all deeply visceral states, it resists language. The rigid maternal identity shaped by social expectations often overshadows what is actually felt. Motherhood becomes defined as duty, service, and self-sacrifice, leaving little room for
contradiction, boredom, or ambivalence. It reduces the experience to a fixed role, while the lived reality remains fluid, messy, and hard to name. And that is why we should keep talking about it.
This article is organised in four parts. The first, The Child, explores how historical and economic conditions shaped reproductive expectations, showing that the idea of choosing whether or not to have children is a relatively recent phenomenon. It traces how conceptions of childhood shifted from survival-based pragmatism to romanticised and commodified ideals. The second section, The Mother, examines the parallel transformation of motherhood, showing how religious traditions, gendered labour divisions, and cultural narratives constructed the ideal of the self sacrificing, morally responsible mother. The third section, The Body, turns to the lived experience of pregnancy, focusing on the sense of physical estrangement and disorientation that arises in unfamiliar medical systems and cultural environments. The final section, The Other, reflects on the limits of language in expressing maternal experience, and on how dominant discourses shape what can and cannot be said about motherhood. The article brings together historical context, theoretical insight, and the personal experience of a first-time mother navigating pregnancy in China as a foreigner, to explore the tension between cultural ideals, institutional structures, and the irreducibly embodied realities of becoming and being a mother.
The Child: Economic Bodies, Emotional Narratives
Anthropologists such as Margaret Mead and Claude Lévi-Strauss have long argued that reproduction was integral to maintaining social structure and ensuring the continuity of subsistence practices (Lévi-Strauss, 1962; Mead, 1970). When resources were scarce and life expectancy was low, having many children was a strategy to offset high mortality rates. In this context, the question “to have or not to have children” was not even conceivable—it was simply necessary. In societies where survival was the paramount concern, every additional child represented a potential contributor to the family’s labor and a means of ensuring that at least some would survive to adulthood (Berry & Foyster, 2007).
In the 16th century, mothers often did not form deep, affectionate bonds with their offspring; infants were typically swaddled tightly—not as a method of comfort, but to render them less of a nuisance in the crowded, resource-strapped households (Heywood, 2001). Much of the high infant mortality during these times was attributable not only to harsh living conditions but also to the practice of abandonment. When survival was at stake, the decision to leave behind a child was a harsh reality. The well-known children’s tale of Hansel and Gretel, in which the siblings are abandoned in the forest by their parents, reflects a period when societal values prioritized production and survival over nurturing, as only those who could contribute economically were deemed worth the investment of scarce resources (Foyster, 2010).
In periods of famine, the rationale was stark: a child was considered a liability rather than an asset. Historical accounts of shipwrecks further illustrate these values. In many such disasters, the order of rescue often reflected the societal emphasis on economic utility: men were rescued first, followed by women, with children being left for last, as they were seen as less immediately valuable to the production system (Belk, 1993)
As the Industrial Revolution took hold, modernisation and industrialisation brought about new modes of production that paradoxically reduced the need for large families while also reconfiguring the role of children in society. Improved public health and reduced infant mortality rates meant that fewer children were needed to ensure the survival of the family line. Simultaneously, as the productive forces of society began to rely more on organized labor, children started to be viewed as future assets, individuals to be nurtured and educated for their eventual roles in the workforce (Zelizer, 1985).
During this period, the changing economic landscape also influenced perceptions of gender roles. Women, who had previously been seen predominantly as reproductive units with limited economic value, began to have opportunities to work outside the home. This shift was part of a broader transformation in which the Industrial Revolution was, in many sectors, carried out with the use of child or female labor—a move that redefined the economic contributions of these groups (Bennett, 2007; Thompson, 1963).
Alongside these economic and social transformations, a new concept of childhood emerged driven by a confluence of artistic expression, evolving philosophies, and religious teachings. By the 19th century, this blend of economic imperatives and cultural reinvention led to an explosion in the modern concept of childhood, where the nurturing and emotional well-being of the child became as important as their future economic potential (Heywood, 2001; Zelizer, 1985).
Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) celebrated the boundless imagination and curious nature of children, inviting readers to view the world with wonder and playful absurdity. Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885) captured the ethereal beauty and fleeting moments of childhood, portraying early experiences as delicate, poetic, and profound. In visual art, painters such as Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot tenderly depicted children and their relationships with their mothers. Educational theories evolved concurrently, with Rousseau’s ideas influencing 19th-century thought by emphasizing children’s natural goodness and intrinsic value. Rousseau’s work influenced later educational reformers such as Pestalozzi and Montessori, who embraced his view of childhood as a distinct and valuable stage of life. Building on these ideas, Friedrich Froebel’s creation of the kindergarten system highlighted the value of play and creativity in education, supporting the idea that childhood is a unique and formative stage that requires intentional care.
By the 20th century, the cultural power of childhood had grown so influential that it reshaped traditional celebrations. Holidays that were once primarily religious observances evolved into events dominated by child-centric symbols and activities. Christmas, for example, saw a significant transformation. The solemn nativity scene, which once underscored the religious narrative of Christ’s birth, gradually gave way to the figure of Santa Claus—a jolly, secular icon whose image was popularized through mass media and commercial advertising (Belk, 1993). Similarly, Easter experienced a comparable shift. The religious focus on the resurrection of Jesus was increasingly supplanted by the whimsical Easter Bunny and the festive tradition of Easter egg hunts, which emphasized fun, family, and playful rituals over solemn religious observance (Anderson, 2007).
This reconfiguration of traditional holidays was driven not only by an evolving appreciation for the well-being and development of children but also by economic imperatives. As capitalism matured, children were recognized not only as future workers but as a lucrative market in their own right. The expansion of mass-market culture positioned children as key participants in economic life, with industries such as toys, apparel, and entertainment tailoring their products specifically for young audiences. This shift further entrenched the modern ideal of childhood as a distinct stage of life, one that was both cherished and commodified.
The Mother: Saints, Tigers, and Other Expectations
Alongside this changing view of childhood, the concept of motherhood also evolved. Yet this evolution cannot be separated from the fact that, for much of history, women had limited control over whether or when they became mothers. Legal restrictions, religious prohibitions, and scarce access to contraception or abortion meant that childbearing was less an individual decision than a social expectation imposed upon women’s bodies. As Foucault (1978) and later feminist scholars such as Ginsburg and Rapp (1995) argue, the regulation of reproduction has been central to how states and societies manage population, morality, and gender roles. This lack of bodily autonomy meant that motherhood was rarely a matter of pure choice: it was shaped as much by structures of control and coercion as by cultural ideals of nurture or sacrifice.
As the child came to be seen as emotionally and developmentally unique, mothers were increasingly cast as primary nurturers responsible for shaping not only the physical health but also the emotional and moral well-being of their children (Hays, 1996; Rich, 1976). This ideal of intensive, emotionally engaged motherhood gained prominence in the 19th and early 20th centuries, closely linked to emerging notions of domesticity, middle-class respectability, and gender roles. Motherhood was no longer simply a biological or practical role; it became a moral vocation, tied to the child’s success and happiness, and increasingly shaped by medical, psychological, and educational discourses.
The growing separation between paid labor in the public sphere and unpaid caregiving in the private sphere imposed a strict divide between productive and reproductive work. This division not only confined women to the role of an endlessly nurturing caregiver but also rendered their extensive contributions invisible and uncompensated, reinforcing an idealized image of the “good mother” (Hays, 1996).
Such expectations have been historically reinforced by powerful religious narratives. In Christianity, Mary is the epitome of maternal virtue, a model of selfless care devoid of personal desire, whose sole purpose is to support and nurture the man who, in Christian theology, is destined to save humanity. In Judaism, the reverence for the matriarchs, such as Sarah and Rebecca, often emphasizes a legacy of nurturing, sacrifice, and moral fortitude. In Islam, figures like Maryam are venerated for their piety, selflessness, and role as nurturing exemplars, reinforcing an ideal where maternal devotion is intertwined with spiritual purity and the fulfillment of divinely ordained roles (Badran, 2009).
These exalted models have had a significant impact on the lived experiences of mothers across diverse cultural contexts. An ideal that often manifests in what is colloquially known as “mother’s guilt,” where women feel intense pressure to sacrifice their ambitions and desires, lest they fall short of the almost mythical standard of self-sacrifice exemplified by Mary.
While the term “mother’s guilt” is not commonly used in China, a comparable cultural ideal is embodied in the figure of the “tiger mother.” This model places a premium on maternal sacrifice, particularly through strict discipline. It upholds a social structure in which a woman’s value is closely linked to her effectiveness in raising high-achieving children, often at the expense of her own emotional well-being and personal aspirations. Crucially, this expectation of selflessness does not end when children reach adulthood. In many Chinese families, mothers are expected to extend their caregiving into later life, frequently taking on the role of full-time nanny for their grandchildren. This unpaid labor can continue for decades, often until the mother’s final years (Chao, 1994; Fong, 2004).
From the moment a woman becomes a mother, she is expected to endure – physically, emotionally, and economically. In China, as in many other parts of the world, childbirth is still shaped by the belief that pain is a rite of passage. Enduring pregnancy and labor without analgesics is often seen as proof of a woman’s maternal strength (Martin, 2001).
The body: Not Yours Anymore
Pregnancy was, perhaps, the closest I’ve ever come to a religious experience. I’ve never been a religious person, but I spent much of my childhood in religious schools, where I was taught that heaven was a reward worth waiting for—though only granted if you met a long list of demands. The two lines on the pregnancy stick are in fact an eviction warning. From the moment a doctor
confirms, “Yes, there’s a little one growing inside you,” it becomes clear that your body is no longer entirely your own. You find yourself under constant scrutiny, expected to follow a set of rules that often feel less like medical guidance and more like sacred commandments. You shall not drink—so you obey, giving up that much-needed glass of wine without protest. But if, like me, you smoke, the moral judgment cuts deeper. Smoking is no longer seen as a vice but as a
disgrace, a near-criminal act associated with desperation and social failure. That commandment is delivered not as restriction but as revelation: “Because now, you’re not just quitting for yourself—you’re quitting for someone else.” Those were the exact words of Dr. Kenix, smiling serenely, hands gently clasped, as she held up the results of my first prenatal test. Then you think—at least I’ll finally get to eat whatever I want. But no, you won’t. First, because your body is no longer playing by any rules you recognize. You’re nauseous, bloated, constipated, and unsettled in ways you didn’t know were possible. Second, because a long list of beloved foods is suddenly off-limits: no soft cheeses, no sushi or sashimi, no deli meats, no shellfish, and even more obscure bans like high-mercury fish and raw sprouts. I happen to love everything on that list—except for high-mercury fish and raw sprouts, only because I’m still not entirely sure what they are. And third, you’re no longer sure what you even like. In my case, I developed a strong aversion to Chinese food—unfortunate timing, given that I had moved to China just four months before getting pregnant.
The pregnant body undergoes a radical transformation, like the teenage body. And much like adolescence, we don’t really learn that until we’re in the middle of it. As I went through what felt like a maternal adolescence, I became convinced there was a tacit agreement among all the mothers in the world not to warn potential mothers just how awful pregnancy can be. For some reason, this vast group of women, including our own mothers and grandmothers, (people we trust!) chose, generation after generation, to keep this secret. They bundled it up, tied a bow around it, and gave it a charming name: “morning sickness.” As if that could capture the full, brutal reality of this costly expropriation of our bodies.
The Body: Biology with Bureaucracy
I’m not sure how it works elsewhere, but in China, the first three months of pregnancy are spent at a family clinic, where you’re seen by a general practitioner. My doctor during the first trimester was Dr. Kenix, a Malaysian woman with excellent English and a voice that managed to be both condescending and empathetic. When I moved to the hospital, my first impression was its sheer scale—it felt more like Shanghai train station than a medical facility. Crowds, queues, scattered booths, and glowing digital signs in scrolling Chinese. I approached a woman at a counter, but before I could speak, she waved me toward the fourth floor: a pastel-green corridor with two doors on one side, one on the other, and a large “VIP” painted on the wall. VIP in China doesn’t necessarily mean you are a very important person. It doesn’t mean you will get better service either. But it does means that people there can speak English, and you pay a higher price for it. I’m very okay with that. I had recently arrived in China with very limited Mandarin skills and was terrified at the thought of giving birth in a language I barely understood.
At the end of the corridor, a large waiting room overflowed with people who looked like they’d been there for hours. My partner and I stood near one of three doors until a nurse gestured us in.
A doctor entered a few minutes later and, without pause, began listing tests: “Haemoglobin, white blood cells, A1c, LDL, creatinine, ALT, AST, GGT, free T4…” I rummaged through my backpack for the folder from Dr. Kenix as she continued: “albumin, bilirubin, alkaline phosphatase…” I finally handed her the paperwork. She flipped through the Chinese pages in silence, then told me I needed more tests. I asked which ones. She didn’t reply, just told me to lie down. “Can I go to the toilet first?” I said. No response. I repeated it louder. Still nothing. “I need to go to the toilet!” I said again. She kept pointing at the bed. “I need to pee!” I said for the fourth time. “Yes, yes,” she finally replied, still motioning for me to lie down. My partner, until then silent, stepped in: “She needs to go to the toilet!” The doctor sighed, then handed me a plastic cup and an ampoule.
I pass through the massive waiting room and find the toilet. It’s a squat toilet, of course. Now, this is something I should be prepared for. Most Chinese toilets are squat toilets, which makes sense both culturally and physiologically. I don’t normally sit on public toilets anyway, I bend just enough so that I am above the target. It’s a half-knee, 150-degree situation. But for this manoeuvre to work it is essential that the toilet has its normal height, because I need to rest my calves against it to achieve the perfect balance. It’s a very delicate ballet. Apart from that, another thing worth mentioning about Chinese public toilets is that there is never any toilet paper—never. And I don’t think it’s because someone forgot to replenish it. It’s more a Chinese social contract where everyone knows they should always carry a pack of Kleenex with them. They know that wiping one’s own backside is a private responsibility. The state provides the porcelain and the flush, but after that, it’s each woman for herself. So there I was with my small plastic container and the ampoule. The plastic vessel was very shallow—maybe 3 cm deep and 3 cm wide, a 25 ml pot. The ampoule had a red line marked on it, which I assumed indicated the required amount of urine. So, the plan appeared to be: urinate into the takeaway sauce container, then use the ampoule to draw up the urine until it reached the red line. A cubicle with no toilet paper is also a cubicle with no toilet paper holder, meaning there was no surface available to put the ampoule on while I was peeing in the tiny pot.
The plan began to take on complications: squatting while holding the container with one hand and the ampoule with the other. If youhaven’t grown up squatting, this is a pretty complicated position in which to stay balanced—not to mention being comfortable enough to let the pee flow out, let alone hit the pee jet inside a 3 cm ketchup pot. A perverse circus act that I had to perform. I’m not going into further specifics about what happened next, but let’s just remind ourselves of Snell’s law of refraction: the pot was 3 cm deep and there was no toilet paper. Adding to that, there was no soap on the sink and the red line marked on the ampoule was unreliable—it wouldn’t let you cap the thing without it overflowing. I left the ketchup takeaway pot, the cap of the ampoule, and my dignity in that bathroom. I cross the gigantic waiting room carrying that uncapped specimen as if it was a test tube with explosive contents, and hand it to the doctor. The doctor looks at me as if I was the most uncivilised of the creatues and, without saying anything, pointed at a nurse (they just love pointing here). The nurse ran and got a tray with lots of other ampoules (all with their caps on). Ashamed, I placed my lidless pee bottle inside one of the slots in the tray and was directed to another room.
The Body: Positioned Accordingly
One of the few joys of reaching the three-month mark is finally seeing the baby. Until then, pregnancy had felt more like an illness. In the ultrasound room, I recognized the setup: the bed, the screen, the little scanner. The sonographer didn’t speak English, and I don’t speak Chinese, but I’d seen enough movies to know what to expect. I noticed my partner wasn’t in the room. A nurse stood at the door, blocking him. I tried to explain I wanted him there. She replied in Chinese something firm that clearly meant “he’s not allowed.” Her body language was sharp, almost disapproving, as if his presence would violate some rule. The movies hadn’t prepared me for that. After some awkward back-and-forth dance, he stepped in anyway. The nurse looked frustrated, and I felt a little bad for her, but it was just another surreal moment in an already surreal process.
I lay down on the bed, and the sonographer, who seemed completely indifferent to the nurse, to my partner, to me, or to the dispute that had just occurred, applied cold gel to my belly. I looked up and realised that there was no screen pointed towards me. The only person who had a small screen which was inaccessible for me was the sonographer. She starts the procedure and I keep trying to lean over to see what she was seeing, but she pushes me back down every time. I gesture emphatically, pointing at my eyes and then at the screen, trying to say, “I want to see.” She doesn’t even glance at me. Instead, she firmly pushes me back down. It was yet another reminder that my body was no longer mine, but a thing to be examined rather than inhabited, a territory that had been expropriated, claimed by others with more authority to interpret it than I had to feel it. It didn’t seem like a fair deal at all. I lay there, passive, like an animal resigned to routine inspection, thinking, how am I the one enduring all these relentless symptoms, these deprivations, and yet I don’t even have the right to see what’s causing them?
“Is it… alive?” I ask.
Despite the bodily estrangement, the worst part of the first three months was not knowing if the thing inside me was alive. The sonographer said nothing, eyes fixed on the screen as she moved across my belly. I looked back and saw my partner behind her, watching the little monitor. He smiled, nodded, gave a thumbs-up. He was my only window to the world inside me. The sonographer handed me papers to clean up—no words, no images, just a gesture to get up. I saved one for the toilet on the way out. At the door, the nurse—who’d earlier had a silent standoff with my partner—was waiting like a guard and ushered me into another room.
The room was tiny—just a bed and a large machine. A woman gestured for me to lie down, then signalled for me to lift my T-shirt. I did. Then she motioned for me to raise my bra. A mammogram? I wondered. She began attaching suction cups connected by tubes to the machine. Three on my head, two on my chest, one on my belly, and several along each arm. I felt like Eleven from Stranger Things, except my “papa” was a Chinese “mama.” The Woman stared at me lying there for a good 10 minutes until the machine beeped and started printing a paper. Without any explanation, she covers my breasts and rushes me to the door.
I am now back at the first room, the same doctor returned and made the exact same hand gesture toward a bed. The bed was tiny and my legs didn’t fit, so I had to keep them bent. The doctor sat at her desk where a computer was set up. She was turned towards my partner and her back was turned to me.
“First child?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“So first pregnancy?”
“Erm…No….”
“Miscarriage?”
“No…”
Uncomfortable Silence
“How old are you?”
“35.”
“You are in the range of geriatric mothers”
“Great.”
While I lay on that tiny bed, wondering why she was asking me questions with her back turned like in a therapy session, two nurses entered carrying some apparatus and suddenly lifted me up. All the nurses at the hospital wear exactly the same clothes: white shoes, pastel pink trousers, a white button-down blouse with tiny pink flowers, and over it a very fluffy pink cardigan. This gives them a very pure and cuddly look, like busy care bears or walking Fruitellas. As the nurses put their hands on me, I asked the doctor what exam exactly I was about to do, “blood tests,” she said. I noticed that each one of the care bears was holding three empty tubes in each hand; They surround me—one of them felt my left arm while the other felt my right—speaking to each other in Chinese while groping the crease of my arm in search of the perfect vein. This ritual gives me immense distress, so I closed my eyes. A few minutes later, I felt a needle entering both my arms.
With my eyes closed, I heard distant voices—but above all, laughter. Footsteps approached, paused, then another burst of laughter, now louder. I opened my eyes to find the doctor and the evil Fruitellas cracking up. “You don’t like taking blood?” the doctor asked, and they all laughed again. I was convinced that I was stuck in a Hao Jingfang novel or some other science fiction dystopia. They kept filling tube after tube while laughing like we were all having fun.
The torture was over. The laughing doctor told me to sit in the chair across from her desk—but didn’t wait for me to sit down.
“Come back in 4 weeks. The nurse will accompany you to process the payment.” “But how about the baby? Is everything okay?”
“Yes.”
“But the ultrasound….can I see some images?”
She handed me an A4 sheet with lots of small black blobs.
“Is that…. the baby?”
“Yes.”
It looked like a Rorschach test.
“Is this…the head?”
“I guess so. The quality of the print is never very good.” She said.
We paid and left the hospital. I felt dehumanized, violated, exhausted. My partner said he wanted to show me something. I knew he was trying to lift my mood, though it felt almost unreachable. He played a video on his phone. There I was, on the sonographer’s bed, T-shirt pulled up. The camera zoomed in on the black-and-white screen: a blurry outline—a head, a nose, the curve of a belly, a leg that slowly stretched. For 14.03 minutes, I watched that small body float. It was the first time in three months I felt okay.
The Other: Neither Metaphor Nor Symptom
My experience navigating pregnancy and motherhood in China is not an indictment of the country’s healthcare system. China provides public healthcare to over a billion people with efficiency and safety, a feat that few nations can claim. Rather, my account speaks to the inherent estrangement of pregnancy itself, the disorienting experience of losing control over one’s own body. This estrangement deepens in a foreign medical system, where you’re just one among millions, never special, never seen. The body is treated like a workstation: practical, impersonal, and entirely separate from the mind, as if what happens to one has no effect on the other (Martin, 2001).
By sharing my personal experience of bodily expropriation, I attempt to communicate the reality of pregnancy and the onset of motherhood as I lived it. I do this not because my story is universal, but because I believe personal narratives hold more weight than detached, impersonal descriptions. Motherhood is deeply personal. To discuss it only in abstract terms would be to strip it of its lived, bodily reality.
Women continue to be blamed, whether by geography, politics, or both. The justification for violence during pregnancy or childbirth often comes in the form of cruel dismissals: Well, you enjoyed making the baby, didn’t you? There is no room for resentment, no space for
ambivalence, no acknowledgement that pregnancy is an experience that expropriates the body and that this body can resist the changes imposed on it. And yet, beyond all variables of space, time, and culture, motherhood remains, above all, a deeply personal experience.
As I mentioned earlier, when I first got pregnant, I kept thinking about the unspoken pact that seemed to exist between all the women in the world. But as time passed and I found myself on the other side of this unspoken agreement, on the side of women with children, I understood something: We do try to explain it to one another. We try to tell each other what to expect, how to prepare, how to protect ourselves. But pregnancy is such a singular experience—so immediate, so physical—that it resists articulation. It must be lived to be understood. The language available—drawn from medicine, cultural scripts, even feminist theory—proves inadequate. It flattens, sentimentalizes, or redirects (Baraitser, 2009). Althusser’s concept of interpellation is useful here: the process by which ideology calls individuals into pre-existing subject positions through language (Althusser, 1971). In pregnancy, these positions—“mother,” “patient,” “woman”—are already established, waiting to be inhabited. Yet the embodied experience often resists them. There is a dissonance between the role language assigns and the reality of what is lived. This is not just a personal struggle to express, but a structural failure of representation.
This failure is not accidental. The available language for pregnancy is shaped by institutional needs: clinical precision, cultural mythologies, and moral expectations. It speaks to the management of bodies, not to their realities (Baraitser, 2009). In this sense, language becomes a tool of discipline, aligning lived experience with dominant ideological frameworks. The subject is not simply named but is positioned, expected to endure, to perform, and to consent. What cannot be spoken, ambivalence, rage, or physical estrangement, is often excluded, misread, or pathologised. This creates not only silence but also a particular kind of loneliness. The body undergoes profound transformation, yet the discourse surrounding it remains static, insisting on clarity and coherence where none exists. As a result, the experience is left suspended between sensation and representation, between what is lived and what can be said.
Once, during a therapy session, I was trying to articulate my ambivalence about motherhood: the exhaustion, the monotony of playing with my child, the guilt of not always enjoying it, and the ongoing question of whether I was truly happy being a mother. At the same time, I wanted another child, and that contradiction made me question my own logic. My therapist listened and then asked, calmly, “What are the good parts of being a mother?” I tried to answer, but was caught off guard by how difficult it was to put them into words.
I began listing moments: holding my child as she melted into sleep, her body warm and heavy with trust; the way she looked at me as if I were the center of her world; her uncontrollable laughter at something completely absurd; the pride in her face when she mastered something new; her wanting to show me this something new; even the strange relief I felt when she finally managed to poop after struggling. My therapist asked again, “Yes, but what is good about it?” I paused. I listed the events, the actions, the external markers of joy.
That was when I realized that much of what makes motherhood meaningful doesn’t fit into the logic of profit we’re used to—the kind of value that can be rationalized, articulated, or justified. We’re taught to pursue things that offer clear rewards, outcomes that make sense within a system of effort and return. But motherhood doesn’t work that way. It follows a different logic entirely. The satisfaction it brings is not conceptual or easily explained; it is something felt in the body, a kind of meaning that resists translation into familiar terms. As a society, we privilege what can be explained, what fits into language and logic, while neglecting the things we experience through the body. But the deepest aspects of motherhood—the quiet, overwhelming, inexpressible moments—exist in that space beyond words. It is essential to make room for these bodily joys, and for the sorrows that come with them, because it is in these unspeakable spaces that we remember we are human. I find myself returning to this truth now, as I move through pregnancy once again, trying to put the unspoken into words.
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