In 2014, Ranim Haddad experienced her first miscarriage, a few months after her marriage. This was followed by 20 terminated pregnancies, one fetal death in utero and the loss of a baby a few hours after birth. Then, in 2025, Emmanuel was born at full term, in perfect health. A story that questions: how far can we go when the desire to become a mother pushes us to never give up?
The desire to have children can be extremely powerful
This trying story ends well but it questions this desire for motherhood at all costs. Can we talk about obsession? For Amélie Boukhobza, clinical psychologist, we must actually look at what this desire represents for her.
“Twenty miscarriages is obviously an extremely trying journey, physically and psychologically. But the number of losses does not tell us anything, in itself, about the way in which she experienced her desire to have a child. She wanted a child. She wanted to be a mother. And his story finally had a happy ending. So much the better !“, confides Amélie Boukhobza.
Indeed, for some women, becoming a mother goes far beyond the simple idea of carrying out a “project”. Desire can touch on identity, filiation, transmission or even family history. “To what we have imagined of our life since childhood, sometimes. To what we have projected. To the place we thought we would one day occupy”, continues the psychologist.
So, when this desire encounters an impossibility or repeated losses, telling yourself that too bad, we are going to do something else (or move on to something else), is not enough. “At least, not without a grieving process, work around renunciation, sometimes also the guilt of not succeeding…”, specifies Amélie Boukhobza.
A single miscarriage can already leave a mark well beyond the end of this pregnancy: it is also, for certain women, the loss of a child already imagined, of a position as a mother already invested, of an entire future that we had begun to build psychologically.
When losses repeat themselves, desire can turn into struggle
With each new pregnancy two very strong emotions can then mix: the hope of finally seeing the project succeed and the fear of experiencing a new loss. And for Ranim Haddad, the hope was all the greater as no specific cause of infertility had been identified. This is also surely why the mother-to-be wanted to try again and again.
But this intense desire for a child is not without consequences.
“Qhen something repeatedly escapes us, we can end up investing a lot of energy trying to regain control. What began as a desire can gradually become a struggle against impossibility itself. A form of relentlessness, sometimes. And why not. Everyone does what they can…”, recalls the practitioner.
For some people, in fact, giving up trying can be experienced not only as giving up a child, but also as accepting defeat, or abandoning all those we have already lost.
At what point does this desire for a child become a subject?
In reality, there is no threshold beyond which the number of attempts would make this desire “problematic”.
“For me, it is not a question of the number of attempts. Nor of the intensity of the desire. This is not enough to define any pathology”, says Amélie Boukhobza.
What matters more is the place that the maternity project ends up occupying in daily life.
“Could she still exist outside of this desire? Could she still experience pleasure, invest in her relationship, her work, her relationships, project herself differently? Could she still question herself about what she wanted, about what she was prepared to go through, about her own limits? Or had her entire existence gradually become organized around a single objective, to the point that nothing else seemed to have any value?” asks the practitioner.
And when the long-awaited child finally arrives?
After 11 years of losses, the birth of Emmanuel necessarily marks a turning point for Ranim Haddad. But what happens psychologically when this long-awaited child finally arrives? In reality, after years of loss, fear, waiting and hope, a birth does not make all that pain go away.
“Some women may continue to experience great worry, find it difficult to relax, to trust in life, to bear the idea that something could happen to this long-awaited child,” confirms the psychologist.
The child can also occupy a very special place in the family, after having been hoped for for years. Vigilance is then necessary so as not to make him bear, in spite of himself, the weight of all the previous losses.
“The child can actually find himself invested with an immense expectation. Not only that of being loved, obviously, but also that of coming to repair all the losses that preceded him,” recognizes the specialist. “Because a child, however desired, does not have to repair the history of his parents.”
But be careful, the idea here is not to judge the journey of this particular woman.
“It’s simply a clinical question that can arise in certain stories: how can we make room for the real child, with his own existence, after having invested the long-awaited child for so long?” she concludes.
A reflection which reminds us that after years of waiting for a child, we must also learn to welcome the one who is there, with his own story.