Abstarct: This study explores the role of motherhood on the English learning experiences, identities, investments, and sense of legitimacy of Iraqi female EFL learners grappling with their motherhood. Situating English learning not as an academic act but as a socially-situated practice within family life, care work, emotional labour and aspirations for the future, the study adopts an analytic frxame that draws on identity-oriented applied linguistics, investment theory, and matricentric feminist scholarship. This qualitative, ethnographic study employs semi-structured interviews with six Iraqi mother-learners across varying marital, employment, and learning contexts. Motherhood reshapes English learning into unbroken fragments of time, physical tiredness, emotional labour, and circumstantial barriers to sustained study. Respondents spoke of fitting study in around children, household chores, jobs, social lives and money. But motherhood also was not experienced only as limiting. And it further tightened investment in the English language as it became almost synonymous with dignity and future, lixnking language acquisition to employability, postgraduate education, education for children, autonomy and supposed future urban movement. Negotiation of learner legitimacy through family support, teacher recognition, institutional flexibility, and social judgment was also revealed in the study. Many of the participants described themselves as being serious and industrious students, yet at the same time they also felt guilty, embarrassed, and the need to justify their educational aspirations. The analysis generated six interrelated themes: motherhood as the reorganisation of time and attention; embodied exhaustion and emotional labour; learner identity and legitimacy; investment and imagined futures; support networks and recognition; and situated agency through everyday strategies of persistence. The findings demonstrate that motivation alone cannot explain the participants’ persistence. Their English learning was shaped by the interaction of personal aspiration, caregiving responsibilities, social recognition, material resources, and institutional conditions. The study therefore calls for flexible, humane, and context-sensitive EFL practices that recognise caregiving as an educationally relevant condition rather than a private inconvenience.