Posparto

Posparto is the period after childbirth, presented in the book as both a physical transition and a profound change in identity, care, and social expectation. Its boundaries are unsettled: the narrator describes the consuming early months of motherhood, while the trial of Alice Espanet turns on whether a postpartum mental illness could explain conduct ten months after birth.

Definition and Temporal Reach

The book treats Posparto less as a neatly bounded clinical interval than as a condition whose effects are argued over in domestic life, medical testimony, and criminal law. The narrator’s account follows the first months after becoming a mother; in Alice Espanet’s case, expert witnesses dispute whether postpartum psychosis could still apply ten months after childbirth. One pair of court-appointed psychiatrists argued that the illness occurs in the weeks immediately following birth, not so long afterward, and said they had found neither psychosis nor depression in Alice. The disagreement makes timing consequential: the same period can be described as an intense aftermath of childbirth or as a condition whose recognized window has already closed.

Birth, Separation, and the Body

Alice Espanet gave birth to twins by planned cesarean at 37 weeks. The girl was breech and Alice had low amniotic fluid. After the operation, the babies were taken away while Alice remained in the recovery room. Her blood pressure fell; she trembled, could not move her hands because of the anesthesia, and was unable to speak or ask whether the children were well. Ritxi tried to ease her thirst by passing lemon-juice swabs over her tongue and gums, since she could not drink until the anesthesia wore off. The boy was placed in an incubator with low birth weight, hypoglycemia, a low platelet count, and respiratory distress; the girl was well but also spent the day in neonatal care.

A perinatal psychiatrist testifying for the defense argued that these first hours should not be underestimated. In her account, a planned cesarean bypassed a significant neurobiological process, including a large release of oxytocin, and the separation could interfere with imprinting and attachment, with possible long-term effects for mother and child. The narrator resisted this generalization through her own experience: she had also been separated from Erik at first, but felt immediate attachment once he was brought out of neonatal care. She also contrasted that bond with her lifelong estrangement from her own mother, despite having been together from the beginning. The testimony therefore presents early contact as consequential without making it a universal guarantee of closeness.

Separation also made breastfeeding impossible for Alice. Without stimulation from the babies, she never produced milk. A midwife visited each morning and tried to express it, sometimes with a pump and sometimes by hand, until Alice cried out in pain. On the third day, when the midwife expected the milk to come in, Alice asked her not to return. She could no longer bear the painful pinching, the midwife’s disappointment, and the effort for only a few yellowish drops; she believed formula would feed the children well and wondered why no pill had been offered to stop the process. The account makes the postpartum body a site of care and medical intervention, but also of discomfort and frustrated expectation.

Care, Boredom, and Selfhood

The narrator describes the ordinary labor of motherhood as more than fatigue or sleeplessness. Feeding, changing diapers, settling a crying baby, and checking whether the baby is breathing after falling asleep fill hours that seem grey and shapeless. This work confines the mother to continuous attention to another person, while the rest of society carries on at its normal pace; its low social regard sits uneasily beside the public ideal of selfless devotion. The contrast makes boredom and isolation part of the postpartum account, rather than treating them as incidental complaints.

The narrator also records how this care reshapes her sense of herself. After three months without sleeping more than three hours at a stretch, repeated visits to the nurse to check the newborn’s weight, and close tracking of the baby’s bodily symptoms, she felt that the identity of mother had driven her former selves into exile. When she went into the street alone, she felt incomplete and believed other people could not understand her without knowing she was a mother. Even a solitary walk did not free her from the child: she continued to carry the baby in her consciousness. The period thus alters not only her routine but the terms on which she recognizes herself.

That absorption does not erase affection. When the narrator collected Erik from daycare, he would notice her, crawl toward her, and offer his arms. She treasured the physical intimacy of his body and wondered whether such contact with life might eventually become visible in her writing. Yet she was unsure that she could experience motherhood as joy in the way she believed she ought to. The book holds tenderness, self-doubt, and the desire for creative life together, rather than treating them as mutually exclusive feelings or equating ambivalence with harm.

Diagnosis and Legal Consequences

At Alice Espanet’s trial, the prosecutor pressed a Belgian psychiatrist to clarify that his diagnosis of postpartum psychosis relied on Alice’s conduct and her own account, without an official diagnosis establishing it. He agreed that those were the bases for his opinion. Two other psychiatrists, who had examined Alice after the events at the request of the investigating judge, disagreed: they detected no psychosis or depression and emphasized the interval of ten months since childbirth. Their testimony included accounts of other infanticide cases in which psychosis had been certified, prompting Carmela Basaguren to object that those examples did not address her client’s case. The hearing exposes how a diagnosis can depend on interpretation of behavior and testimony while experts dispute both the evidence and the relevant timeframe.

The period also has a legal history in the book. It recounts how Queen Victoria intervened so that women who had fallen into disgrace would not receive the death penalty for infanticide. In Spain, infanticide was treated as a distinct offense from homicide between 1822 and 1995; the former law tied the offense to a mother’s effort to conceal her dishonor, and later reform proposals considered emotional strains associated with childbirth and the puerperal state. The 1995 Criminal Code removed the separate offense, leaving a mother who kills a baby liable to conviction for murder. Canada retains a different provision: the book describes infanticide involving a child under one year, where pregnancy, childbirth, or lactation has disturbed the mother’s mind, as an offense exempt from punishment if mental disorder is demonstrated. These contrasts show that postpartum distress is not only a medical question but also a category through which law defines maternal responsibility.

In Alice’s case, the defense invoked Article 20.1 of the Spanish Criminal Code, which exempts criminal responsibility when a psychological disorder prevents a person from understanding the unlawfulness of an act or acting in accordance with that understanding. The jury accepted the defense of mental incapacity, and the judge replaced imprisonment with outpatient psychiatric treatment. The book does not present childbirth alone as settling the question of responsibility; instead, it shows how the meaning assigned to the postpartum period can shape diagnosis, trial argument, and the form of punishment.