Isabel—María Julieta Mansilla

Isabel—María Julieta Mansilla is a mother-daughter relationship shaped by coercion, caregiving, and Isabel’s refusal to identify as a mother. Isabel carried and raised María Julieta, but says that her pregnancy was imposed on her and that performing parental duties never made the child feel like her daughter. Her account unsettles the assumption that birth and care necessarily produce maternal attachment, while showing how other people’s decisions helped define the family around her.

Origins of the Relationship

Twenty years before Elena visits her, Isabel is found vomiting in the street while on her way to seek an abortion. Rita recognizes that she is pregnant and argues that she should continue the pregnancy. Isabel says that she does not want to become a mother; Rita counters with religious claims about the life inside her and insists that Isabel already is a mother. The encounter is not a mutual decision: Rita takes the exhausted Isabel away from the address she was heading toward and brings her to her own home.

The documents in Isabel’s handbag confirm the pregnancy and provide her address. Rita reads the papers, obtains a taxi, and arranges for Isabel to be taken home, with Elena helping her. Isabel later explains that a nurse gave her the address of the abortion provider after Isabel sought her husband’s help and was rejected. Her husband, Marcos, had already learned of the pregnancy and assaulted and threatened her; Isabel says that he and his partner kept her under close supervision during the pregnancy. These circumstances make María Julieta’s birth the outcome of a pregnancy Isabel did not choose to continue, rather than evidence that she had wanted motherhood.

Care Without Maternal Identification

Isabel distinguishes the work of raising María Julieta from the feeling and identity she associates with being a mother. She says that she fed her, took her to school, bought her clothes, and held birthday parties for her. She also says that she loved her in an unusual way because María Julieta is a good person, but not with the love of a mother for her daughter. In Isabel’s account, practical care and affection exist alongside a persistent sense of distance; neither cancels the other.

That distance is present in the family’s ordinary forms of address. María Julieta calls Isabel by her name, not Mum, and, Isabel says, has always known the difference between them. Isabel was unable to nurse her after the birth, and rejects Elena’s suggestion that holding the baby might have transformed her feelings. The contrast between a visible family role and an inwardly disavowed identity makes their relationship neither a simple absence of care nor a conventional maternal bond.

The Family Isabel Describes

Isabel identifies Marcos and his partner as the parents María Julieta recognizes in practice. Her husband took photographs and sent them out each year with his partner, who was also María Julieta’s godfather; Isabel says that the two men shared parental life and that Marcos was both father and mother to the child. She describes herself instead as someone María Julieta cares about like a friend, neighbor, roommate, or traveling companion. The household may appear as a family from outside, but Isabel sees its portrait as an arrangement that conceals the unequal and imposed origins of that family.

When Elena assumes that Isabel must feel indebted to Rita for having a daughter, Isabel disputes that understanding of their shared past. She does not describe María Julieta as a gift that repays Rita’s intervention. Instead, she returns to the fact that she never wanted to be a mother and that other people—her husband, his partner, Rita, and Elena—wanted that role for her. Her account makes the relationship inseparable from the pressures that surrounded her pregnancy and from the people who subsequently assumed or assigned parental roles.

Confrontation and Significance

In their later conversation, Isabel insists that the passage of time has not changed how she understands herself. She has performed duties toward María Julieta and acknowledges affection, but does not accept those actions as proof that she became a mother in the sense Elena expects. Her answer challenges Elena’s belief that childbirth and the later presence of a child in the home must bring maternal feeling into being.

The relationship therefore holds together facts that Elena would prefer to reconcile: Isabel raised María Julieta, yet says she was never her mother; María Julieta grew up within a family portrait, yet Isabel regards the image as something made for other people to admire. Isabel’s testimony does not erase the care she gave. It refuses to let that care, or the fact of birth, stand in for a maternal identity she says was never hers.