In the recent decades, pregnancy and motherhood issues have been critically addressed by feminist theories through conceptualizations of the good mother ideology, emotional and intensive mothering. These ideologies include so called emotional regulation and rules of expressing, which balance women's perceptions and emotional expressing of socially acceptable emotions. Due to the tendency to harmonize the desired, anticipated emotions and those actually experienced, women perform so called emotional work (managing one's emotions). Anticipated emotions, related to the happy mother construct, are happiness, joy, delight, while in reality mothers can experience socially inacceptable emotions, such as anger, frustration, guilt, sadness and regret. The emotions experienced by mothers and pregnant women can be positive, negative or ambivalent, which indicates the ambivalence of emotions. In the empirical part, mothers confirmed the duality of emotions and present their solutions for successful management of such duality. In the empirical part, based on the theoretical basis with the support of quality research method - interview, it is foud out, how the society perform pressure to achieve socially acceptable emotions with mothers in accordance with happy mother construct and how mothers cope with udesired and unexpected emotions.
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