Motherhood as an Imagined Belonging and Rebirth

Motherhood becomes, for Norma Jeane Baker, an imagined form of belonging: a role made tangible through care, touch, and daily ritual, and powerful enough to feel like a new beginning. Her bond with Irina gives her a place in the world that she can inhabit as an action rather than merely claim in words. But this borrowed security is fragile. When Irina disappears with her mother, Harriet, the loss exposes how little control Norma Jeane has over the relationship she has come to experience as maternal.

Care as an inhabited identity

Norma Jeane’s attachment to Irina takes shape in ordinary, repeated acts. She pushes a squeaking stroller through a small, shabby park, its weak palms surrounded by litter, and sings to the baby during their afternoon outings. Nursery rhymes accompany the rocking of the stroller; Irina looks at her, smiles, curls her small fingers around Norma Jeane’s, and imitates the word for mother. In this routine, care is not an abstract wish. It is work performed with the body, renewed each afternoon through singing, watching, and holding.

The scene makes the contrast between outward circumstance and inward feeling especially sharp. The park is scarcely attractive, and the wider world is marked by war, yet Norma Jeane’s heart swells because she has discovered a way of understanding herself through what she does. Her sense of identity comes not from possessing a secure family history but from being needed by a child. The stroller and the ritual walk become modest instruments of belonging: the setting offers no grandeur, but the relationship makes it feel sufficient.

This sense of self also depends on how other people read the pair. Passersby admire Irina, sometimes praising both the baby and her beautiful mother. Norma Jeane blushes or smiles, answers questions about the child’s name and age, and takes pride in describing the approaching first birthday. When asked about a husband, she says he is serving far away in New Guinea. The exchange places her inside a recognizable family picture, one in which she is mother and wife. Her brief hesitation and correction from singular to plural pride—she is proud, or rather they are—suggest how readily the public image and her private attachment join together.

A child as a beginning again

The passage’s maternal imagery reaches beyond the stroller scenes. In a brief, intimate image, a child is addressed as the one through whom the world begins anew, as though life before that child had contained no one. The mother looks at the baby and remains silent for a long moment; the watching voice fears that she may cry or flee, then sees joy and astonishment on her face. The emphasis falls not on an explanation of motherhood but on the force of recognition: the child’s presence appears to make a new emotional world possible.

Set beside Norma Jeane’s care for Irina, this image gives maternal love the shape of rebirth without making it a permanent rescue. The idea that a child can make the world begin again is emotionally vivid precisely because the text also shows how precarious such renewal is. Norma Jeane’s daily role is real in its gestures and consequences, but it cannot secure her place in Irina’s family. The distinction between loving as a mother and having the authority or permanence of a mother quietly governs the relationship.

War makes that distinction harder to ignore. Irina’s father is a second lieutenant in the United States Army, somewhere in New Guinea, and is officially missing in action after December. Norma Jeane manages not to dwell on his uncertain fate. What matters to her in the daily ritual is the baby’s gaze, smile, grasp, and attempt to call her mother. The focus on these small signs of attachment gives temporary shelter from an absence that cannot be resolved. Her maternal role is therefore both a source of joy and a refuge from losses already surrounding the child.

The disappearance and the loss of belonging

In March 1944, Harriet leaves Verdugo Gardens with Irina, taking most of her things and leaving without explanation. Norma Jeane is stunned by the disappearance and immediately confronts what the child’s absence means to her: how is she to manage without her Irina? She remembers, with the vagueness of a dream, bringing the baby to Gladys Mortensen and receiving Gladys’s blessing. Now that Irina is gone, the imagined blessing cannot confirm or preserve the bond. The loss takes away not only a loved child but also a scene in which maternal care seemed recognized and permitted.

The other women in Harriet’s household are as bewildered as Norma Jeane. Harriet has not returned to her parents in Sacramento or her in-laws in Washington; she has paid her share of the rent and left without saying goodbye. The account that she had spoken of disappearing, and that she was not made to be a widow, gives the departure a background of grief and instability without revealing where she has gone. Norma Jeane cannot turn that uncertainty into a reunion. She tries to call the police station in Mission Hills to report a missing mother and daughter, but stammers too badly to continue. She also understands that Harriet is an adult and Irina’s mother, and that there is little anyone can do if Harriet has chosen to leave.

Her certainty that Harriet was a friend and would never leave without a farewell collides with a more frightening report: Harriet had sometimes behaved strangely and had tried to hurt Irina, or may have hurt her in a way that was not visible. Norma Jeane rejects the accusation and insists that she would have noticed. The dispute reveals two incompatible pressures within her attachment. She must defend Harriet as her friend, yet the thought of an unseen injury to Irina threatens the belief that the child was safe with her mother. Love intensifies the uncertainty rather than resolving it.

From caregiving to helpless witness

After the disappearance, the feared harm returns in a dreamlike scene. Norma Jeane sees Harriet bathing Irina in scalding water while the baby cries in pain and fear. Norma Jeane believes she is the only one who can save her, but cannot find the room: she runs back and forth through a steaming corridor without doors. The image reverses the earlier scenes of successful care. Where the afternoon ritual allowed her to reach Irina’s hands and meet her gaze, the dream traps her in motion, separated from the child by an inaccessible space.

The terror carries into waking life. At dawn, blinded by the bathroom’s overhead light, Norma Jeane seeks refuge in a tub filled with boiling water. Her teeth chatter and her skin burns. When Bucky Glazer finds her at six in the morning, he understands from her wide eyes and dilated pupils that he must not touch her. The bath repeats the dream’s danger in her own body, turning fear for Irina into an immediate physical crisis. Motherhood, once experienced as a sequence of intimate actions, has become a desperate wish to protect someone she cannot reach.

The concept’s emotional force lies in that reversal. Caring for Irina briefly lets Norma Jeane feel that identity can be built through tenderness and that a child’s presence can inaugurate a world. Harriet’s departure shows that this belonging rests on a relationship Norma Jeane cannot command or make secure. The recurring language of beginning again therefore remains an aspiration, not an achieved resolution: maternal love gives her a home in practice, while the disappearance leaves her with the grief of having loved as a mother and the helplessness of not being one in law or power.