Motherhood and maternal identity

Motherhood and maternal identity are repeatedly treated as things that should be self-evident: a mother is expected to know her child, love her, and care for her. The novel makes each of those assumptions unstable. Elena insists that she remains a mother after Rita’s death, while Isabel describes becoming a parent without wanting or identifying as one. Between them, Rita’s care for Elena and her intervention in Isabel’s pregnancy show how acts of care can express attachment and impose another person’s idea of what a woman’s life should be.

Identity Beyond the Mother’s Name

Elena’s understanding of herself rests on an enduring bond with Rita. She believes that no one can know her daughter as well as she does because she is Rita’s mother, and she holds on to the conviction that she loved Rita even though affection was rarely spoken or physically expressed and the two often fought and kept their distance. For Elena, the relationship is real despite its silences. Her questions arise only after Rita dies: without a living child, does she still count as a mother, or has death taken not only Rita’s body but also the name that defined Elena?

Her illness has not, in her view, erased her maternal identity. Parkinson’s has altered what her body can do, restricting movement and making ordinary tasks difficult, but Elena distinguishes those bodily changes from the fact of being a mother. Rita’s death presents a different kind of threat: it leaves Elena unsure whether motherhood can persist when its defining relationship has been broken by loss. The distinction matters because Elena’s struggle is not simply to mourn her daughter. She is also trying to understand who she is now that the role through which she understood herself has no living counterpart.

The question surfaces again in Elena’s conversation with Father Juan. He tells her that she remains a mother, but she resists accepting a name supplied by the Church or anyone else if it might also determine how she is entitled to live or die. She leaves without resolving the question through his reassurance. The exchange sets two claims against each other: motherhood may endure beyond the child’s life, yet naming that identity can also become a way for institutions to prescribe a woman’s conduct.

Rita’s Care and Its Limits

Before Rita’s death, she is Elena’s principal caregiver. She arranges an extensive salon appointment around Elena’s medication schedule, hoping to make her mother’s appearance different and, as she tells her, to change how she herself has to look at Elena each day. Her explanation ties care to exhaustion and to the accumulated intimacy of helping with daily routines. The scene does not make Rita’s effort either simple devotion or simple resentment: she undertakes the work, but she also names its emotional cost and the distress of being continually confronted with her mother’s increasing dependence.

The salon visit makes that dependence concrete. Elena cannot manage the appointment without assistance, and the staff struggle to help her through the treatments. Rita has arranged the outing, but she leaves Elena there, more irritable than usual and without greeting Mimí. The visit therefore holds care and frustration together: the plan is made to serve Elena, but it also reflects Rita’s wish that something about their shared life might change. In another scene, after hearing Dr Benegas describe the likely progression of Elena’s Parkinson-Plus syndrome, Rita rejects his expectation that she will simply take on the role of her mother’s mother. The doctor presents future care as repayment for what parents once gave their children; Rita sees a profound difference between caring for a child who is growing and watching Elena lose abilities.

Elena nevertheless receives the doctor’s pamphlets and leaves with Rita. At home, she reads them by herself while Rita is elsewhere. That small division of action underscores the unequal, uneasy nature of their care: medical information addresses both women, but it does not make their responses identical or settle who will bear what comes next.

Motherhood Imposed on Isabel

The novel’s sharpest challenge to the idea that motherhood follows naturally from pregnancy comes through Isabel’s account of how she met Rita. Twenty years earlier, Rita found Isabel ill on her way to an address associated with ending her pregnancy. Rita stopped her and brought her to Elena’s home rather than allowing her to continue. She argued that Isabel was already a mother and that the decision was not hers to make. Isabel had said she did not want to become a mother; Rita persisted, applying religious and moral beliefs to another woman’s body despite Isabel’s refusal.

Elena remembers this episode as proof of Rita’s determination and, at first, understands Isabel’s relationship with the family through the debt she assumes Isabel must owe her daughter. Isabel later rejects that account. She says she never wanted motherhood and that other people—including her husband, Rita, and Elena—wanted it for her. The difference between the women’s memories is not a minor disagreement: it exposes how an act one person may regard as saving or creating a family can be remembered by another as the loss of control over her own life.

Isabel describes fulfilling practical responsibilities toward María Julieta Mansilla: she fed her, took her to school, bought her clothes, and organized birthday parties. She also says she loved her in a way, yet did not experience herself as María Julieta’s mother. María Julieta calls her Isabel, and Isabel understands the child’s father and his partner as the parents who occupy that role. Isabel’s account thus separates pregnancy, daily care, affection, and maternal identity rather than treating them as interchangeable. The work of raising a child is real, but, in her account, it does not settle what motherhood means to the person doing it.

Competing Stories and Unresolved Identity

Elena’s encounter with Isabel forces her to face how little she knew about the woman whose past she had organized around Rita’s intervention. She had imagined that Isabel’s life with María Julieta demonstrated the good that came from Rita’s insistence. Isabel describes instead a life in which she performed duties without becoming a mother in her own understanding. The framed family photographs in Isabel’s home sharpen the contrast: they present a family for others to see, but Isabel says that the image does not capture the relationships as she experiences them.

Elena does not readily accept this account. She answers Isabel’s rejection by insisting that her feelings changed once she held and cared for the child, but Isabel tells her that she was not able to nurse María Julieta and never felt that she was her mother. Elena’s certainty about what motherhood must mean collides with Isabel’s testimony about what she lived. The scene also recalls Elena’s earlier confidence that, as Rita’s mother, she must know her daughter. Maternal attachment gives Elena a powerful way to interpret both women’s lives, but it does not give her complete access to either of them.

The novel therefore leaves maternal identity unsettled rather than offering one final definition. Elena understands motherhood as a bond that survives conflict, illness, and a child’s death. Rita acts on a belief that a pregnant woman is already a mother, even when that woman says she does not want the role. Isabel distinguishes the duties she performed from an identity she says she never possessed. Their conflicting accounts make care consequential but not conclusive: neither biological connection nor sustained responsibility can, by itself, erase the differences between what a woman is expected to feel and what she says she has experienced.