A mother knows, a mother knows, a mother loves

A mother knows, a mother knows, a mother loves names the certainty Elena takes to be part of motherhood: that a mother knows her child fully and can anticipate how she will respond. In Elena Knows, this is not simply an affectionate maxim but a claim that shapes Elena’s understanding of Rita and of their relationship. As illness, care, and death expose the limits of that claim, the phrase becomes an assumption Elena must learn to question.

The certainty behind the phrase

Elena believes that being Rita’s mother gives her a privileged knowledge of her daughter. She treats this knowledge as fundamental rather than partial: motherhood, in her view, carries an assurance that a mother knows and loves her child. The conviction helps Elena explain Rita to herself, but it also leaves little room for what Rita might feel or endure beyond what Elena can see.

The novel places that confidence within a difficult, long-standing mother-daughter relationship. Rita is not only Elena’s daughter but her full-time caregiver, and their intimacy includes dependence, frustration, and mutual resentment. The phrase’s clean symmetry—knowing, knowing, loving—sits uneasily beside a relationship in which closeness does not guarantee understanding.

Caregiving makes intimacy visible

Rita’s decision to take Elena to a beauty salon makes their daily relationship concrete. She has arranged a wash, cut, dye, styling, manicure, pedicure, and waxing appointment around Elena’s levodopa schedule, so Elena will not go without medication. Elena resists the outing and says Rita could cut her toenails herself. Rita answers that the problem is not simply Elena’s appearance: she is the one who has to look after her mother every day.

Rita describes the labor that this entails: getting Elena out of bed, sharing meals across from her, helping her with her dentures and nighttime trips to the bathroom, and returning to arrange her feet, sheet, or pillow when Elena calls. The salon scene therefore complicates the phrase without disproving the love within it. Rita attends to Elena’s needs, but she also names the bodily closeness and exhaustion that make caregiving painful. Elena’s conviction that she knows Rita cannot by itself encompass the caregiver’s private experience.

The illness exposes a widening gap

That gap becomes sharper when Dr Benegas tells the women that Elena has Parkinson-Plus syndrome. Rita presses him to explain what “more” means by listing the indignities and losses she has witnessed: Elena’s difficulty walking, swallowing, breathing, dressing, managing her dentures, and caring for herself. Her anger makes visible a future she fears she will have to manage, while Elena tries to quiet her and insists that she wants to remain in her own home.

Dr Benegas predicts that Elena may soon be unable to get out of bed, feed herself, or use the bathroom without help, and says Rita should consider hiring assistance. When he tells Rita that she will have to become her mother’s mother, Rita rejects the comparison between Elena’s decline and a baby’s development. She describes instead a body losing abilities it once possessed and says she does not think she can become the mother the doctor is asking her to be. The exchange reveals how little the maternal maxim can say about the actual terms of care: love does not erase the labor, fear, or limits involved. Elena accepts the care pamphlets and later begins reading them, while Rita withdraws to her room; they walk home without speaking.

Love without complete knowledge

After Rita’s death, Elena’s certainty gives way to a question she cannot answer for herself: whether she was a good mother. With Isabel, she acknowledges that she and Rita loved each other, while allowing that they did so in their own way. Isabel does not claim that love made their relationship simple; instead, she recognizes that intimacy always takes its particular form. The exchange preserves their attachment while refusing to turn it into proof of perfect understanding.

Elena also asks whether Rita feared inheriting her illness. Isabel suggests that Rita could not bear to see Elena suffer, and that shouting may sometimes have been easier than crying. This interpretation does not restore Elena’s former certainty or establish everything Rita knew. It offers Elena a way to consider her daughter’s distress without pretending that a mother can read every thought or motive.

The phrase’s final significance lies in that revision. Elena has to confront the difference between loving Rita and knowing her completely; she can no longer use motherhood as a guarantee that closes that distance. Her grief and self-doubt do not cancel their love, but they make room for what the maxim excluded: a daughter’s experience may remain partly unknown even to the mother who cares for her.