Todas putas, menos mi madre

The expression Todas putas, menos mi madre names a contradiction at the heart of the book’s account of motherhood: women are divided into idealized mothers, supposedly untouched by sexuality, and other women, whose sexuality is treated as proof of moral danger. The Narrator presents the phrase as a familiar story rather than a truth. Its force lies in how readily that story turns a complicated reality—desire, care, exhaustion, vulnerability, and harm—into a stark moral binary.

The Binary Behind the Expression

The book traces the ideal of the sexually untouched mother across traditions rather than treating it as a uniquely Judeo-Christian invention. Its examples include Athena, who remains a virgin while claiming Ericthonius as her child; Maia’s conception of Buddha in a dream; Coatlicue’s miraculous pregnancy; and the Persian god Mithra’s birth from the virgin Anahita. These stories make maternity appear separable from sex, recasting the mother as a life-giving figure outside ordinary bodily experience.

The Narrator identifies the consequence of that separation: if a woman is a mother, sexuality is imagined to have no place in her life; if she is associated with sex, she risks being excluded from the category of mother and cast instead as a threat. The phrase’s blunt generalization exposes the structure rather than endorsing it. Its exceptional mother is protected from the condemnation directed at women as a class, while the sexual woman is made available for suspicion, including the suspicion that she might destroy life rather than give it.

The Narrator’s Experience of Motherhood

The Narrator’s own account unsettles the ideal of maternal feeling as simple, complete, and self-sustaining. At first, she privately resents Niclas for the pregnancy, knowing that he wanted to become a father and was already oriented toward the practical demands of a baby. After a period of doubt, she accepts the responsibility and begins to want the child. The movement from resentment to attachment does not erase the mixed feelings that came before it.

After the birth of Erik, the Narrator finds that motherhood changes how she experiences herself in public. Before becoming a mother, her pregnant body attracted attention that her identity as an author did not; people wanted to touch her belly and asked about the baby. Later, when she is alone in the street, she feels incomplete and as though an essential part of her is missing. Even a solitary walk does not free her from the child: she carries the baby in her consciousness. After three months without more than three consecutive hours of sleep, repeated weight checks, and close attention to the baby’s bodily symptoms, she feels that the identity of mother has displaced her other identities, including writer, worker, wife, and daughter.

The book also gives this engulfment its ordinary, often uncelebrated texture. Motherhood means breastfeeding, changing diapers, running laundry, settling a crying baby, and checking whether he is breathing after he falls asleep. The Narrator emphasizes the long, shapeless hours of this work as well as its exhaustion: a mother can be confined and constantly available to another person while the rest of the world continues at its normal pace. That account challenges the expectation that self-giving should feel naturally fulfilling or socially rewarded.

Yet the Narrator’s ambivalence coexists with powerful attachment. At daycare, Erik notices her arrival, crawls toward her, and reaches out to be held. She cherishes his body and the intensity of their reunion, and wonders whether this contact with life will eventually enter her writing. She also considers leaving him at daycare for longer, but is troubled by how the choice might appear to Niclas, the educators, and herself. The scene refuses both easy condemnation of maternal fatigue and a sentimental resolution: love is present, but so are the pressure to enjoy motherhood and the fear that something is wrong when enjoyment does not come easily.

Alice Espanet and the Trial’s Competing Stories

The expression gains particular weight in the account of Alice Espanet’s trial. Alice’s conduct as a mother is described through conflicting patterns: according to Mélanie, the au pair, Alice could monitor every detail of the babies’ care, correcting how they were held, changed, or given cream, then withdraw to her studio and leave Mélanie alone with them. Her moods also shifted around the twins’ weight, sleep, and health. These details contribute to the dispute over whether Alice was mentally ill and how far illness could explain, or excuse, what she had done.

The defense argued that Alice should be absolved on the ground of mental incapacity under Article 20.1 of the Spanish Criminal Code. In questioning, the prosecutor pressed the psychiatrist on the basis for diagnosing postpartum psychosis: Alice’s conduct and her own account, without an official diagnosis establishing the condition. The psychiatrist agreed that those were the grounds for his assessment. The exchange makes visible a central problem in the trial: the evidence about Alice’s mental state was inseparable from interpretations of her behavior and testimony.

The courtroom’s competing accounts do not make the deaths disappear. As the defense advanced explanations involving psychosis, madness, and hallucinations, the Narrator held in view the twins’ drowning and the mother’s hands. That insistence prevents the language of maternal idealization from swallowing the children’s deaths, just as the account of Alice’s mental illness resists a simple portrait of an evil mother. The trial becomes a contest over how to judge an act without pretending that either a maternal identity or a psychiatric explanation settles every question.

Meaning and Narrative Function

The phrase works as a compressed version of the book’s larger criticism of maternal ideals. The Narrator’s account gives no support to the expectation that a mother must be endlessly strong: she describes herself as more vulnerable after having a child, frightened by accidents, illness, and dangers beyond her control. When Erik undergoes a lumbar puncture and is kept overnight for observation with viral meningitis, Niclas comforts her. The episode makes care reciprocal rather than the mother’s solitary, inexhaustible duty.

By placing the expression beside both everyday maternal ambivalence and a criminal trial, the book distinguishes difficult feelings from harmful actions without making either disappear. The Narrator can love Erik, feel confined by caregiving, fear failing him, and struggle to write; those experiences do not collapse into one verdict on her character. Alice’s case raises a different and graver question of responsibility, shaped by evidence, psychiatric testimony, and legal judgment. Todas putas, menos mi madre names the comforting division that would sort women into innocent mothers and dangerous others. The narrative keeps that division in view precisely so that it can show what it cannot explain.