Parenting & Family Quote by Sharon Gless

Gless turns the supposedly glossy fantasy of motherhood into a horror sequence, and the move is deliberate: she starts with the culturally approved image (carrying a baby, feeling life) only to yank the floor out from under it. The nightmare isn’t about pregnancy as spectacle; it’s about the moment after, when the story society tells women ("you’ll be fulfilled") is replaced by the bodily reality of responsibility. That “pounding pulse of fear” is a key detail because it frames the dread as physical, not philosophical. It’s not an abstract reluctance, it’s panic with a heartbeat.

The subtext is a refusal of the tidy narrative that maternal instinct is automatic and ecstatic. She isn’t confessing a lack of love so much as naming a forbidden emotion: terror at irreversible change. The dream structure does important work here. In dreams we don’t negotiate or rationalize; we react. By describing fear that arrives “every time after it’s born,” Gless suggests the anxiety isn’t a one-off wobble but a recurring, patterned truth - like a script she can’t improvise away.

As an actress from an era when female public figures were expected to project composure, the candor lands as cultural friction. It hints at the pressures of timing (career, age, public scrutiny) without spelling them out. The intent isn’t to shock; it’s to normalize ambivalence by giving it a visceral language. The nightmare functions like a spotlight: it illuminates how much of “wanting children” is desire, and how much is expectation wearing the mask of desire.