New mothers: A research on the experience of women who have recently had a baby about their role as mothers

Abstract

This work explored the experience about the role as mothers of women who have had a child within a year and a half starting from the beginning of the research study. We were interested in the organization of the first ways of relating both within the mother/infant pair and between the latter and the broader context: family, friends, work, social context and health services. Thirty-six mothers were interviewed through the Emotional Text Analysis (ETA). The birth of a child changes family relationship and also affects the wider social sphere. The child is symbolized within a continuum that goes from the new human who will adapt to the existing to the entrance of a dangerous unexpected event. Complex cultures concerning birth result in contradictory events: while their relevance is emphasized, births decrease. In this research study that was carried out during the pandemic, one of the cultures that emerged (a cluster from a statistical point of view) expresses an overlap between the pandemic itself and a suspension regarding the new mother’s usual ways of life: work, domestic life, couple life, friendships. The greatest anomic experience emerges in the cluster concerning pregnant mothers, filled with a deep disorientation. Becoming a mother is no longer a confirmation of identity, it is an anomic experience. When the child is born, there is a conflict between the cluster regarding the mother-infant pair, who elaborates their relationship in isolation from the rest of the world, and the cluster about the services dedicated to birth, characterized by a medicalized culture, aimed at normalizing birth and ignoring the mother’s experience and emotions. Then there is the cluster about the hospital that is associated with childbirth, where the strictly medical technique appears. Here there is a form of help, if the dependence on a power that is both medical and paternal is accepted, similarly to becoming a daughter again. Mothers are unsatisfied users of services and experts who implement prescriptive and normalizing cultures, but there is no different demand for them. The disagreement emerges, which is fragmented and not organized in a demand for a different intervention. It is relevant to understand what the conditions are for proposing services attentive to the demand of mothers, especially those who turn to these services.