The imagined child of pregnancy always disappoints against the real one

Evidence

Yet, at the same time, there is a wondrous curiosity in every young mother. It is a strange miracle to see, to hold a living being formed in and coming out of one’s self. But what part has the mother really had in the extraordinary event that brings a new existence into the world? She does not know. The being would not exist without her, and yet he escapes her. There is a surprising sadness in seeing him outside, cut off from herself. And there is almost always a disappointment. The woman would like to feel him hers as surely as her own hand: but everything he feels is closed up inside him, he is opaque, impenetrable, apart; she does not even recognize him, since she does not know him; she lived her pregnancy without him: she has no common past with this little stranger; she expected to be familiar right away; but no, he is a newcomer, and she is stupefied by the indifference with which she receives him. In her pregnancy reveries he was an image, he was infinite, and the mother mentally played out her future motherhood; now he is a tiny, finite individual, he is really there, contingent, fragile, demanding. The joy that he is finally here, quite real, is mingled with the regret that this is all he is. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1490

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the existentialist theme of the imagined project versus achieved reality — gives concreteness to Beauvoir’s notion that a woman’s pregnancy reverie is a transcendence dream that collapses into immanence when the actual baby arrives. — connects to: Parents systematically overestimate how closely their children adopt their own attitudes — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 982; Fears of a distinguishable child arise from parental identity built on self-optimization. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror…, 656
• SEED: An essay angle on how expectation mismatches in raising children — the infinite imagined child versus the finite real one — structures maternal ambivalence universally.

Broader Connections

• Parents systematically overestimate how closely their children adopt their own attitudes #corroborates (0.75) — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 982
• Fears of a distinguishable child arise from parental identity built on self-optimization. #complicates (0.72) — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 656