Being a mother is not an universal attribute of the female individuals of the human species, but the conception of mother s function and mother s place are constantly influenced by the socio-cultural context. We are nowadays witnessing a multiplicity of female destinies and it is witnessed that new challenges are being introduced to motherhood, more specifically to the configuration of the primary maternal preoccupation. This classic concept of Donald Winnicott is defined as a maternal state that begins at the end of gestation and lasts throughout the early life of the child, promoting a deep identification from the mother with her baby, in order to enable her to attend to her basic needs. In this state, the woman lives, at the same time and paradoxically, an anchoring in herself, in the infant that returns to her from the process of becoming a mother, as well as a maternal subjectivity silencing in favor of the proto-symbolic and intersubjective communication with the child. Our proposal in this work, then, is to investigate the female experience on the path to maternity, and more specifically, to analyze how it occurs the construction of the primary maternal preoccupation, that is, what conditions for its establishment are, as well as the challenges it shows in the contemporary context. Based on our longitudinal field research with middle-class women of productive and reproductive age in Rio, we point to the emergence of new nuances in the state of primary maternal preoccupation, featured the higher maternal expectation regarding the father s participation in the caring for baby. In this field of maternity construction, the care ethics is a central element, once rather than the biological conditioning of women in the subject matter, the desire and symbolic fields are shown as determinants in this endeavor.