Mater Dolorosa: The Mother's Fate of Suffering

Mater Dolorosa: The Mother's Fate of Suffering is the book's name for a powerful ideal: the mother as a figure whose proper place is beneath the cross, enduring pain and weeping. The Narrator exposes the violence of that ideal by setting it against the ordinary work, ambivalent feelings, and acute fears of actual motherhood. Her account does not deny love or care; it asks why they are so often treated as obligations that a mother must fulfill through limitless self-sacrifice.

The Maternal Ideal

The chapter heading Juxta crucem lacrimosa, repeated twice, places the mother beside the cross before the argument has begun. An anonymous fifteenth-century funeral song then gives the woman's postpartum wound an unexpectedly domestic answer: baked apple and red wine. The contrast links maternal suffering to bodily recovery and everyday sustenance, rather than allowing it to remain a remote religious emblem. The later formulation Mater dolorosa, mater lacrimosa makes the underlying demand explicit: the mother is expected to suffer and to make suffering her destiny, at Gólgota.

The Narrator tests this expectation against a series of pointed questions about what a mother is supposedly allowed to do. Gossip in court, read Brazilian poetry, or eat with unfamiliar people in Asian restaurants: these activities are set against the prescribed posture of kneeling beneath the cross and crying. The contrast is not simply between motherhood and pleasure. It reveals a moral script that defines maternal virtue by renunciation, turning the mother's own interests into evidence against her. In this script, pain is not merely something that may accompany care; it is what proves that the mother has accepted her proper role.

Care, Attachment, and the Erasure of the Self

The Narrator's earlier reflections show how deeply that role can reshape identity. Before motherhood, public attention gathered around her pregnant belly: people wanted to touch it and asked about the baby's sex and possible name. After the birth, walking alone felt entirely different. She imagined that passers-by could not understand her unless they knew she was a mother, as if her visible solitude made her incomplete or fraudulent. Even when she tried to take a solitary walk, she felt she had not left the baby behind; she carried him in her consciousness.

The change is measured in the details of care. After three months without more than three uninterrupted hours of sleep, repeated visits to the nurse to check the newborn's weight, and close attention to the baby's excrement, vomit, mucus, and coughs, the identity of mother had displaced the Narrator's other selves. The lost identities include writer, worker, wife, and daughter, as well as memories of a younger life as a tour guide at Loch Ness and a naked swim in Trafalgar Square's fountain. The list makes self-erasure concrete: motherhood has not simply added a new identity but pushed former ones into exile.

The book also refuses to make attachment a simple cure for exhaustion. The Narrator describes the hours of breastfeeding, changing diapers, settling a crying baby, and checking whether he is breathing after he falls asleep. These routines fill days that seem gray and shapeless, while time carries on normally for everyone else. The labor is isolating, continuous, and socially undervalued; the ideal of self-giving, meanwhile, is praised as desirable and even revolutionary. That disparity gives Mater Dolorosa its critical force: praise for a mother's devotion can coexist with indifference to the conditions and boredom of the work that devotion entails.

Love Does Not Cancel Ambivalence

The Narrator's account of collecting Erik from childcare holds together feelings that the maternal ideal would prefer to separate. Erik recognizes her as soon as she enters, leaves what he is doing, crawls toward her, and reaches out his arms. She embraces him and tries to take in the perfection of his small body, imagining that such contact with life might eventually become visible in her writing. Yet she remains unsure whether she can enjoy this love as she believes she ought to. Tenderness is present, but so are doubt and the pressure to turn maternal experience into proof of happiness or artistic value.

Her fear for Erik exposes another contradiction. She calls him her obvious weak point and describes herself as more vulnerable than ever, even while acknowledging the fierce impulse to defend him. The strength imagined by mothers online, expressed as the power of a lioness, does not protect against accidents, kidnapping, illness, or other dangers beyond a parent's control. When Erik is hospitalized and undergoes a lumbar puncture, the Narrator has to look away; Niclas embraces her. The test confirms viral meningitis, which is not initially considered serious, but Erik remains overnight for observation because his fever is high. At his bedside, the parents keep watch on either side of the cot, speaking in whispers when he sleeps and falling silent whenever he coughs. Care here is not an abstract maternal instinct but shared attention, fear, and physical presence.

Alice Espanet and the Cost of Judgment

Alice Espanet's story brings maternal suffering into a criminal and medical frame. The testimony of Mélanie, the au pair, presents care in a less consoling light: Alice could supervise every movement, advising how to hold or change the babies, then withdraw to her studio and leave Mélanie to manage alone. Her moods were unpredictable, and she worried intensely over the twins' weight, sleep, and possible illness. The evidence depicts instability and strain, not a single uncomplicated portrait of either a devoted mother or a monster.

The defense of Alice Espanet argued that mental illness could exempt her from criminal responsibility under Article 20.1 of the Spanish Criminal Code. At trial, the prosecutor pressed a psychiatrist on the basis for diagnosing postpartum psychosis: Alice's behavior and her own account, without an official prior diagnosis. The exchange shows how the case turns on interpretation—what conduct can establish, what a patient's account can mean, and how far illness can explain or mitigate a crime. The book's juxtaposition of maternal vulnerability with criminal responsibility does not make suffering an automatic explanation or excuse. It instead reveals the pressure placed on legal and medical categories when the person under judgment is a mother and the alleged victims are her children.

The Narrator also sets contemporary cases beside legal histories in which infanticide received distinct treatment because of the mother's circumstances. She recalls Queen Victoria's intervention on behalf of women who might otherwise have faced execution, and Spain's former separate infanticide offense, which remained in the criminal code from 1822 to 1995. The historical provision framed a mother's killing of a newborn in terms of concealing her dishonor; later proposals invoked emotional strain around childbirth and the puerperium. Canada, by contrast, retains a provision for infanticide involving a child under one year when pregnancy, childbirth, or lactation has altered the mother's mental state. These contrasts show that law does not merely measure a fixed maternal condition: it decides which forms of suffering count, and what consequences follow.

A Refrain Interrupted

The Mater Dolorosa ideal returns with particular force when the Narrator's own son becomes ill. As the jury withdraws to deliberate in Alice Espanet's case, the narrative moves to Erik in a hospital cot, his cheeks flushed and his fever treated with antipyretics. The Narrator recognizes his fragility and her own; a spinal needle enters his back, and she cannot watch. The medical result brings relief: the meningitis is viral and not, in principle, severe. Yet the family still spends the night in observation, with Niclas and the Narrator keeping vigil beside the cot.

Niclas tells the Narrator that they are doing well; she replies that they will do better from then on, while recognizing that she means she herself will do better. The self-correction condenses the burden the book has traced: even shared care can become, in a mother's mind, a private standard she must meet more perfectly. The hospital episode does not resolve that burden into either triumph or failure. Instead, its ordinary acts—watching, listening, nursing, waiting—challenge the monumental image of the mother beneath the cross. Mater Dolorosa remains a recognizable cultural script, but the book makes visible what the script conceals: a mother is not made invulnerable by love, and suffering is neither the whole of motherhood nor a fair measure of how well it is lived.