Maternal ambivalence

Maternal ambivalence in Elena Knows is not a simple absence of love but a conflict shaped by coercion, obligation, bodily experience, and the demands of care. Isabel describes the shame of not wanting motherhood after becoming a mother, while Rita’s intervention in Isabel’s pregnancy and her later resistance to caring for Elena reveal how maternal roles can be imposed in opposite directions. The novel sets idealized expectations of maternal devotion against women’s accounts of what those expectations cost.

Forms of Ambivalence

The novel presents ambivalence both around becoming a mother and around caring for one’s mother. Isabel recalls feeling guilt and shame because she did not want to perform the tenderness that others assumed motherhood would bring. Rita, meanwhile, has spent years attending to Elena’s daily needs, but rejects the idea that filial duty can simply turn her into a replacement mother. These experiences are not equivalent: Isabel’s unwanted pregnancy follows sexual violence, while Rita’s conflict emerges from the prolonged demands of caring for an ill parent. Their juxtaposition nevertheless shows how the language of maternal responsibility can obscure women’s own wishes and limits.

The contrast also complicates the idea that maternal knowledge is automatic. Isabel distinguishes imagining a decision from knowing what it means once pregnancy becomes a physical reality. Her account challenges the certainty with which Rita once claimed to know what Isabel should do, and the certainty with which others prescribe how a mother ought to feel. In both cases, the social role is treated as if it could settle a personal conflict; the women’s experiences show that it cannot.

Isabel’s Unwanted Pregnancy

Rita encounters Isabel vomiting across the street as Isabel is on her way to seek help ending her pregnancy. Rita first recoils, then turns back and offers assistance. Isabel refuses, but Rita argues against the abortion by invoking sin, the future child, and the belief that Isabel will come to want motherhood. Isabel insists that she does not want to be a mother and does not regard the pregnancy as a child. Rita counters that a child cannot exist without a mother and treats the decision as something Isabel should not make for herself. When Isabel becomes dizzy, Rita takes her by the arm and brings her home.

The dispute exposes a consequential gap between Rita’s conviction and Isabel’s stated wishes. Rita understands her intervention as saving a child and acting on religious belief; Isabel experiences it as another person claiming authority over her body. Years later, she tells Elena that Rita treated her body as available for someone else’s use. When Elena visits, Isabel interprets the visit as a renewed attempt to use her, although Elena says that is not why she came. Their encounter is therefore shaped not only by the original intervention but by the persistence of its consequences and the difficulty of making one person’s intention answer for another person’s experience.

Isabel explains that her pregnancy followed sexual violence by her husband, Marcos. She says that he forced the relationship until she became pregnant and did not touch her again afterward. A male companion of Marcos, whom Isabel identifies from a photograph and recalls as present, helped keep her under control during the pregnancy. Isabel also describes being confined and sedated under supervision, while people around her treated her as if she were mentally ill. She had sought help from Marcos after learning she was pregnant and telling him she did not want a child; he responded with anger and threatened the marriage. A nurse from his clinic had supplied the address where Rita found her, after witnessing her distress. The account places Isabel’s unwanted motherhood within relations of violence and institutional power, rather than presenting it as the result of an unconstrained choice.

Experience, Knowledge, and Its Limits

When Isabel speaks with Elena, she says that she had once thought she would never consider abortion, but that this judgment belonged to an imagined situation, before pregnancy. Receiving a positive test changed the question: she understood that thinking about a decision and knowing it through lived experience were not the same. She also describes the guilt of not wanting to hold or comfort her daughter and the shame intensified by people who insist that mothers should want motherhood. Her account does not resolve the conflict by declaring that she came to feel as expected; it gives her words for the distance between a prescribed maternal feeling and her own experience.

Isabel’s testimony also unsettles Rita’s earlier certainty. Rita had argued that Isabel would want the pregnancy once she heard a heartbeat, but Isabel’s later account centers not on a universal maternal instinct but on the particular circumstances under which she became pregnant and was made to continue it. When Elena cannot immediately answer, Isabel presses her to recognize that an abstract belief about what a mother should do is not the same as knowing what another woman has endured. The scene makes listening, rather than claiming certainty, a necessary part of confronting the past.

Caregiving and Reversed Roles

Rita’s ambivalence becomes explicit in her care of Elena, whose Parkinson-Plus syndrome is accompanied by growing dependence. At a doctor’s appointment, Dr Benegas explains that Elena will need increasing help and describes the change as a reversal in which Rita will have to become her mother’s mother. Rita rejects the comparison with infancy: she points to Elena’s worsening speech, mobility, and bodily control as the reverse of a child’s development, and says she does not think she can take on the maternal role being demanded of her. She cries, making visible a strain that she has long expressed through anger and complaint.

An earlier argument at a salon gives that strain its everyday circumstances. Rita has arranged a long grooming appointment around Elena’s Levodopa schedule, so her mother will not go without medication. Elena sees no need for it; Rita answers that she is the one who faces the daily work of getting Elena out of bed, sharing meals, helping with nighttime trips to the bathroom, and responding when Elena calls for adjustments to her feet, sheets, or pillow. Rita’s frustration is directed not only at appearance but at the unbroken intimacy and labor of caregiving. The appointment’s careful accommodation of medication sits alongside her resentment: practical devotion and exhaustion coexist rather than cancel each other out.

After Rita refuses the pamphlets Dr Benegas offers, Elena accepts them herself and holds out her arm for Rita’s help in standing. The gesture leaves their dependency intact without suggesting that Rita has agreed to become the mother her doctor describes. Across Isabel’s and Rita’s experiences, maternal ambivalence names a conflict between the demands placed on women and the limits of what they can willingly give. The novel treats those limits not as proof of indifference, but as part of the lived reality concealed by the expectation that mothers will know, want, and provide whatever care is required.