Beyond the Cradle: Motherhood, Embodied Exhaustion, and the Silent Erosion of Women’s Selfhood

The concept of being a mother has been touted as a holy thing, a blessed feature of life that is celebrated by many people around the world, being seen by many analysts of society to represent the ultimate epitome of feminine identity. There exists, however, a complex psychological phenomenon behind that concept that is seldom talked about, a phenomenon that is hereby researched, exploring the concept of how, within the context of a patriarchal, a collectivist, a gender-based structured society, the role of being a mother can lead to a diminishment of the individual’s identity, utilizing various theories related to the concept of individual’s identity, including theories of role conflict, affective work, ethical coding of the role of idealized being a mother, all of which create a means of causing a negative diminishment in one’s individuality, emotions, and psyches, contending that it is not being a mother that causes an individual, a woman, to lose her individuality, but rather it is how being a societal structure of being a mother expects one to lose herself that leads her towards a diminishment of her individual identity.