A Meaning to Life: Persistence in the Search for Motherhood
摘要
Becoming a mother is an event that significantly marks the trajectory of a woman’s life, since motherhood inaugurates discontinuities in the female social identity and new responsibilities emerge from it, including changes in the sense of the self and in the relationships I-other-world (Pontes, 2019; Pontes & Simão, 2018). It is an experience strongly influenced by the collective meanings related to being a mother, given that motherhood is still highly valued in many societies (Cruz & Mosmann, 2015). However, although it is an event that is personally and collectively expected, motherhood is not an experience that occurs to all women, and when it does, it is experienced in an idiosyncratic way by each person.