Social norms about motherhood

In Elena Knows, social norms about motherhood turn a complex and unequal set of experiences into an apparently simple rule: women should want to become mothers, and mothers should know and care for their children. Rita invokes that rule to deny Isabel authority over her pregnancy, while Elena relies on maternal identity to believe she knows Rita completely. Their convictions meet their limits in the realities of unwanted motherhood, intensive caregiving, and the possibility that love or kinship does not make another person fully knowable.

The Assumptions Behind Maternal Identity

Elena’s confidence rests on the belief that motherhood grants special knowledge. She assumes that because Rita is her daughter, she can predict how Rita would act and understand what Rita feels. The idea is not merely personal: Elena treats it as a shared social truth, one that promises that a mother knows and loves her child. The novel makes this certainty part of Elena’s understanding of herself, so that questioning her knowledge of Rita also unsettles her maternal identity.

That confidence is tested by the story’s movement between the present and events from twenty years earlier. Elena’s effort to understand Rita’s death brings her into contact with Isabel, whose life reveals the consequences of treating motherhood as a universal desire rather than a particular experience. What Elena thought motherhood guaranteed—knowledge, intimacy, and authority—does not provide a reliable account of either woman’s life.

Rita Imposes Motherhood on Isabel

Twenty years before Elena visits Isabel, Rita finds her distressed and vomiting as she is on her way to seek an abortion. Rita stops her, insists that she will regret the decision, and invokes religious teaching and the idea that a pregnant woman is already a mother. Isabel repeatedly says that she does not want motherhood and does not recognize the pregnancy in those terms. Rita answers by asserting that Isabel’s feelings cannot decide the matter: in her view, the pregnancy itself establishes a maternal identity and obligation.

Rita’s intervention is consequential partly because she acts with certainty about an experience she has never had. She presents other women’s regret and future maternal feeling as facts, although she cannot know Isabel’s experience from the inside. The narrative stresses the contradiction: Rita is not a mother and will never become one, yet she applies her convictions to another woman’s body and helps determine the course of Isabel’s life. Maternal language, in this encounter, does not simply describe a bond; it becomes a means of overruling a woman who says she does not want to be a mother.

Isabel’s Account of Unwanted Motherhood

When Elena later visits, Isabel challenges the assumptions behind Rita’s intervention. She describes the guilt and shame of not wanting to touch or comfort her infant daughter, and the pressure of living among people who insist that a mother should want to be a mother. Her experience makes visible what Rita’s certainty had excluded: continuing a pregnancy does not guarantee that a woman will feel the emotions society expects, or that motherhood will become a wanted identity.

Isabel also connects this history to a wider pattern of other people claiming authority over her body and decisions. The circumstances of her pregnancy and its continuation were controlled by others; years later, she understands Rita’s intervention as another instance in which someone presumed to decide what her body should be used for. She accuses Elena of arriving with a similar willingness to use her, this time in pursuit of answers about Rita. The parallel forces Elena to confront the difference between intending to help and respecting Isabel as a person whose choices are her own.

Isabel’s reflections distinguish what can be asserted from what can only be learned through experience. Rita spoke as though she knew what abortion or motherhood would mean for Isabel, but Isabel says she has lived the consequences of becoming a mother when she did not want to be one. Her account does not turn her into a simple opposite of Rita: she has a daughter, yet rejects the idea that this fact supplies a complete name or identity for her. The novel thus resists treating motherhood as either a natural fulfillment or a single, uniform emotional state.

Caregiving and the Reversal of Roles

The expectation that motherhood entails care also shapes Elena and Rita’s daily life. As Elena’s Parkinson’s disease advances, Rita performs intimate, repeated tasks for her: helping her get out of bed, preparing for her needs at night, and assisting with routines Elena can no longer manage independently. At a hair appointment Rita has arranged around Elena’s medication, she explains that her anger is bound up with the work of caring for her mother and with the relentless closeness of that work. The scene gives the social ideal of devoted care a material counterweight: caregiving involves labor, dependence, resentment, and limits, not simply affection.

A doctor’s prognosis makes the expected role reversal explicit. He tells Rita that she will have to become her mother’s mother as Elena’s needs increase. Rita rejects the comparison with infant care: Elena’s illness is not a child’s development, and Rita does not believe she can become the caregiver the doctor is asking her to be. Her response complicates the idea that a daughter’s duty follows naturally from her status as a daughter. The expectation that women should mother others can recur across generations, even when the person assigned that role says she cannot bear it.

What the Novel Leaves Unsettled

By bringing Elena and Isabel together, the novel places two challenges to maternal certainty in the same conversation. Isabel does not fit a settled ideal of the mother who welcomes and delights in motherhood; Elena, after Rita’s death, doubts whether she has succeeded as a mother or can still claim that identity. Their encounter moves toward recognition not because either woman acquires perfect knowledge of the other, but because both confront the limits of the categories through which they have understood themselves and one another.

The resulting critique is not confined to Rita’s decision or Elena’s mistaken confidence. It concerns a social order that treats motherhood as proof of desire, a source of automatic knowledge, and a permanent obligation to care. The novel sets those expectations against women’s stated wishes and lived circumstances. Its central tension is that maternal identity can offer belonging and meaning while also being imposed as a rule—one that may silence the very people it claims to describe.