Isabel and Julieta's mother-daughter relationship

Isabel and María Julieta Mansilla’s mother-daughter relationship is shaped from its beginning by imposed pregnancy and Isabel’s ambivalence about motherhood. The novel presents the bond not as a simple expression of maternal instinct, but as a relationship formed amid constrained choice, social judgment, and Isabel’s painful recognition that she does not feel what others expect a mother to feel.

The Circumstances of Motherhood

Isabel’s pregnancy follows sexual violence by her husband, Marcos. When she sought to end the pregnancy, Rita intervened and insisted that Isabel was already a mother and must continue it. Isabel’s refusal to accept that framing did not alter the outcome: Rita took her away from the place where she had sought an abortion and brought her to Elena’s home. The circumstances of María Julieta’s birth therefore connect the mother-daughter relationship to a decision made under pressure rather than to a freely chosen desire for a child.

Isabel later describes how her husband and his associate controlled her during the pregnancy. She was sedated and watched by nurses, while others took charge of her circumstances. The account makes clear that the pregnancy unfolded within a wider loss of control over her body and decisions. This history informs the distance Isabel describes between the social identity of mother and her own experience of becoming one.

Isabel’s Maternal Ambivalence

In speaking to Elena years later, Isabel recalls the guilt she felt when her infant daughter reached for her and she did not want to touch, rock, swaddle, warm, or cuddle her. She describes empty breasts and the shame of not wanting to be a mother, intensified by the insistence of people around her that a mother should want motherhood. Her account does not present this lack of desire as proof that she is indifferent to María Julieta; it shows the distress of being judged against an expectation that does not match her experience.

Isabel’s words distinguish having a daughter from possessing a settled maternal identity. Despite having a child, she says, “I’m something else, something that doesn’t have a name”. The relationship remains marked by that unresolved gap: María Julieta is Isabel’s daughter, but motherhood does not become an identity Isabel can simply inhabit without conflict.

Family Context and Significance

María Julieta’s place in the family is also shaped by the adults around her. Isabel explains that Marcos named his male companion as the child’s godfather. The detail situates María Julieta within a household whose apparent family roles conceal Isabel’s account of violence, control, and an unwanted pregnancy; it does not, by itself, establish the later quality of the daughter’s relationship with either parent.

Through Isabel’s recollection, the novel sets the fact of motherhood against the experience of being compelled into it. Her account challenges Rita’s certainty that pregnancy automatically makes a woman a willing mother, and it exposes the emotional cost of treating that identity as inevitable. The relationship between Isabel and María Julieta is thus presented chiefly through the tension between a real mother-daughter bond and Isabel’s refusal, or inability, to make maternal feeling conform to social expectation.