Anxiety About Motherhood and Fear of Repeating Maternal Abuse

Amaia Salazar’s fear of motherhood is not a lack of love for her child; it is the fear that love and care may fail to keep her from repeating the abuse she suffered. Pregnancy first brings her a peace she had never known, then gives way to the return of childhood terror. After Ibai’s birth, fatigue, work, and disagreements with James over feeding turn that buried fear into a painful question about what kind of mother she can be.

Identity and Background

Amaia’s anxiety takes shape against the history of her childhood. She remembers being five years old and afraid to sleep in her own bed because her mother might come to watch her in the dark. She would lie still with her eyes closed, sensing her mother’s approach and trying not to disobey the command not to open them. The threat that her mother might eat her made bedtime an ordeal of vigilance rather than safety. When fear became unbearable, Amaia begged to sleep beside her sisters: Flora Salazar rarely agreed, while Rosaura Salazar was more likely to relent if Amaia cried. That refuge was conditional, but it offered protection from being alone with her mother.

Amaia’s grandmother Juanita had a name for the nocturnal presence that haunted her: Gaueko, the one of the night. As an adult, Amaia understands that she had made some progress in confronting the truths buried by her childhood, but did not regard that progress as a final victory. The fear had retreated when she began to understand what had happened; it had not disappeared. Her later pregnancy therefore arrives in a life already shaped by the effort to keep that darkness at bay.

Pregnancy and the Return of Fear

Amaia had long wanted to be a mother. The desire reached back to her own unhappy childhood, and became more concrete after she met James. When motherhood seemed uncertain, she even considered fertility treatment. Then, nine months before the birth, she became pregnant while investigating the most important case of her life. For much of the pregnancy she felt unusually energetic, slept peacefully, and experienced neither the discomforts nor the nightmares she might have expected. The pregnancy seemed to offer a calm and fullness unfamiliar to her.

That calm began to recede in the final weeks. Amaia had little energy, and Clarice’s dominating presence in the household made her feel more acutely how depleted she was. Clarice bought enthusiastically for the baby, favoring pink dresses and elaborate clothes; Amaia, by contrast, had bought only a few booties, shirts, leggings, and neutral-colored pajamas. She could recognize the beauty of the dresses in shop windows, yet recoil when she held them, feeling confused and angry at her own response. Beneath her distaste for the frills was an envy of Clarice’s uncomplicated excitement: Amaia wanted to feel that happiness herself.

She was happy, or believed she ought to be, and the difference between those things troubled her. Old fears began slipping into her dreams. During a severe contraction, she followed the breathing techniques she had learned but felt compressed and frightened. She knew that some fear of childbirth was ordinary; what alarmed her was that this fear seemed deeper than labor. Amaia understood its return as a sign that her earlier confrontation with her past had won only a battle, not ended the conflict. The pregnancy had brought peace, but the old terror returned during a period of physical vulnerability.

Motherhood After Ibai’s Birth

After Ibai’s birth, the pressure changes form. Amaia is tired, hungry, and moving between work and the demands of a newborn; after an autopsy and a day spent crossing the city, she has little time with her son and even less time to herself. James tells her that he misses her. She nearly goes to him for the embrace that has long represented their mutual care, but frustration overtakes the impulse. She misses herself, too, and resents what feels to her like James’s failure to understand the demands she is carrying. She leaves the room angry, while also recognizing that he is a loving husband and a good father, and that her anger may be unfair.

The disagreement becomes sharper when James suggests that continuing to breastfeed may be incompatible with her work and that she might switch Ibai to a bottle. Amaia wants to do well for her son, but the question reaches back beyond practical arrangements. She tells herself that she must be a good mother—both for Ibai and for the child she once was. In her frightened reasoning, failure to be good threatens to make her a bad mother like her own. Exhaustion becomes more than exhaustion: she wonders whether her frustration means something is wrong with her, and why motherhood has not brought the happiness promised in the books she has read.

Instead of voicing those fears, Amaia answers James defensively. She reminds him that he knew she was a police officer and had accepted that she would continue working. She frames his suggestion as doubt about whether she can be a good wife or mother, then tells him that marriage is not a life sentence. Her words express anger at the immediate dispute, but also the pressure of measuring herself against an impossible standard: she needs to prove, to herself as much as anyone, that her mother’s behavior will not define her own.

Sisterly Witness and Family Responsibility

The past becomes more than a private memory when Rosaura finally tells Amaia what she witnessed. As children, the sisters had tried to sleep together because Amaia was afraid. One night Rosaura changed beds after Amaia had fallen asleep. Their mother came to the bed, apparently believing Rosaura was Amaia, and whispered the same threat Rosaura had heard before. Rosaura was terrified; once their mother left, she got up and returned to Amaia’s side. She had kept the incident secret for years, and says she began watching their mother as she watched Amaia.

Amaia responds by placing responsibility where she believes it belonged: not on Rosaura, who was also a child, but on their father, the adult who should have protected her. She remembers that he protected their mother and forced nine-year-old Amaia to leave the home where her father and sisters remained. The family’s silence had left the sisters carrying different parts of the same terror: Amaia lived with the threat, while Rosaura witnessed it and kept watch. Rosaura’s disclosure gives Amaia confirmation, but cannot undo the failure of protection she names.

The novel also surrounds motherhood with concealed birth and loss. When Amaia hears the explanation that Rosario had said one child was stillborn but had not mentioned another, her heart seems to stop for a moment. The revelation makes family history feel bound up with the fate of infants and with what adults choose to conceal. It echoes Amaia’s fear that motherhood can be marked by harm and secrecy, though it does not settle the question she faces about how she herself will care for Ibai.

Significance

The pattern that defines Amaia’s anxiety is the return of a childhood fear at the moment she most wants to create safety for a child. Pregnancy gives her a rare interval of peace, but does not erase the past; postpartum strain then makes the gap between ideal motherhood and lived exhaustion feel like evidence against herself. Her fear is not simply that she may feel tired or ambivalent. It is that such feelings might mean she is becoming the mother who frightened her.

The account of Doctor Berasategui’s childhood offers a separate, darker echo of maternal deprivation. Amaia describes his mother, Margarita Berasategui, as depressed and unable to bear her son touching her, despite keeping the house clean and the family’s practical needs met. The contrast underscores that material order alone does not provide a child with love or companionship. It does not make Amaia’s history identical to his; rather, it places the question of what a child needs beside her own determination to be a good mother. Across these strands, the central struggle remains unresolved by reassurance alone: Amaia must distinguish the trauma she inherited from the care she is trying to give.