After the birth of her first child, the relentless work of motherhood left award-winning Mexican journalist Daniela Rea feeling overwhelmed, despairing, and afraid of losing her identity. She took up the tools of her trade and began a series of interviews with other women, some mothers, some caregivers. As she listened to their experiences of providing care for others, sometimes under extreme circumstances, she began to find a place and a meaning for her own story.

Fruto examines the personal and social contradictions of care. Fourteen voices weave in and around Rea’s own, punctuated by diary entries from her first days of motherhood and reflections on her upbringing that are sparked by a lengthy interview with her own mother. Throughout, she engages with an international women’s chorus of philosophers and feminists, poets and essayists, and the result is a compelling page turner that chronicles a journey of listening in search for meaning.

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March 27, 2014

And now we’re here and happiness weighs seven and a half pounds and is eighteen inches long. This day will last my whole life.

I started this diary the day my first daughter was born. It was a kind of conversation with myself, sometimes with her, and then later with them, when Emilia, my second daughter, joined the family. My partner, my mother, my sisters, my girlfriends, were with us, but there were things I could only speak of between the two of us, my daughter and me.

Something of my fragility, of the contradiction that motherhood revealed to me, and which devastated me. Only here, in this diary, did I feel I was myself.

Later, in 2018, after I had been writing for a little more than four years, fragments of this diary were published in the anthology Tsunami, edited by the writer Gabriela Jáuregui. Gabriela, also a friend, invited me to participate in the anthology with an essay on motherhood. All I could offer her were these words that became, with her help, the piece “While the girls sleep.” My fragility and my contradictions drew me closer to other women, mothers, daughters, sisters. And I understood that these were not only the words and misgivings of a mom. They were, above all, a daughter’s questions.

“We Enter a New Space. Space filled with the presence of mothers, and the place where everyone is a daughter…” wrote Susan Griffin in Woman and Nature, a book that Terry Tempest Williams’s mother read and underlined in college. Tempest Williams then quoted the underlined passage in her book When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice. I am the history of my mother and her mother and her mother before her. I am also the history of my daughters. I am their fruit.

April 15, 2014

I woke before dawn. Ricardo slept on one side of me and you, my daughter, on the other. I had been unable to sleep for days and I woke up troubled. What’s the point of making a family? I asked Ricardo this, or maybe I only thought it. Ricardo was sleeping and I didn’t insist, not sure if I wanted an answer. I lay there in the darkness and silence, lying between the two of them, filled with a sense of doubt made of weariness, confusion, regret, and distress. I don’t know why.

There I was, between the two of you, but I felt alone. Not only in facing that question, but alone in the immensity of life, my own life and yours, my daughter. Our small eternity. Alone in that vastness of time. In knowing that I would never again stop being a mother and that, in that moment, I felt insufficient. For myself and for you. My girlfriends have taught me that we never think alone. In her novel Empty Houses, Brenda Navarro also asks: “What is a home and what makes one? At what point did we become parents and children? […] When does a home become a home and what makes one?” And I feel like she, though somewhere far away, is here with me.

April 22, 2014

Fold the sheets, fold the baby clothes, fold the diapers. Take out one breast, take out the other. Burp the baby. And perhaps, if there’s time, wash my face, check myself in the mirror.

April 27, 2014

Today you are one month old, and I don’t love you yet. We are slowly getting to know one another. I’ve spent these past days watching your face, your full-moon cheeks, your gestures, learning your language. I remember that when you were born my friend Nade called me up, excited to ask me if it’s true that children make you feel the greatest, most unconditional and marvelous love you can feel in life. I said no. Not yet. It’s something else: tenderness, the body.

They teach us that the love we have for a daughter is something automatic, and if we don’t feel it when we have the fruit of our womb in our arms then something is wrong with us. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau constructed an ideal of female happiness and equality telling us that it’s only when women care for our children with dedication and sacrifice that we will have a place in society. Two centuries later, the philosopher Élisabeth Badinter responded that Rousseau’s feminine ideal both exalts the splendor and nobility of this task and at the same time condemns all women who don’t comply with or perfectly execute it.

Badinter also asked herself whether or not maternal love is instinctive or something we learn based on our social and historical contexts. In her book Mother Love: Myth and Reality Badinter revisits the maternities of urban French and English women during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She notes a certain disinterest in the women of that time for newborn babies, which was interpreted as a fear of caring for a child with a higher probability of dying than living before reaching the age of one. “This interpretation would have us believe that the coldness of the parents, and of the mother in particular, served as emotional armor against the great risks of seeing the object of their affection die. To put it a different way: Better to not grow too attached or you’ll suffer later on.” But Badinter dares to invert the equation: “It was not so much because children died like flies that mothers showed little interest in them, but rather because the mothers showed so little interest that the children died in such great numbers.” Badinter writes of mothers who did not want to raise children, who rebelled against pregnancy, giving birth, and breastfeeding children, all activities confined to the home and lacking in social recognition. These Western and urban women wanted to be free and to direct their freedom toward other activities that warranted social recognition, a recognition of their existence. They wanted, and they demanded, to be more than just life-givers. Badinter claims that being a mother is not innate, that there is nothing natural in motherhood. The history of the past few centuries—which Badinter methodically traces—shows us that the notion of motherly love is evolutionary. Maternal love is a human sentiment. And like all sentiments, it is uncertain, fragile and imperfect. It may or may not exist, be present or disappear. And it shouldn’t be taken as a given. Maternal love does not exist, Badinter tells us. Love exists. Without adjectives. I agree with Badinter on this, that giving birth to a child does not cause you to feel this way. At least, it is a relationship that involves other things before love: survival, dependency, wonder, tenderness, need.

April 29, 2014

I was not born a mother. Nor did I become a mother when she was born. I have become one little by little: when I wake at night for her to drain my breast, when I cry because I don’t know how to calm her crying, and in moments like this, when I was able to put her to sleep in my arms and I’m still alive and realize I can do this.

May 7, 2014

The postpartum period is over. My daughter and I went to see Yolanda, the midwife. She asked how I was doing, and I said whatever came to mind: I’m fine, tired, still learning, until she told me not to hide what I’m feeling. And then I started crying. I feel desperate, frustrated, angry. I’m between the unknown world of her and my known world that constantly calls to me. I feel like they are two forces tugging at me and that she and I are stuck in the middle, despondent. Yolanda recommended that I let go, stop struggling between these two forces. She suggested I talk to my daughter, tell her honestly how I feel.

I remember how minutes before my daughter split my hips open in order to come out from between them, I had to calm myself and overcome my sense of dread. I couldn’t do it alone. I asked my partner to hold me, to calm me down so that I could let my body do what it knew how to do, to trust it. Society teaches us that to be a mom is to take care of things, to be in control, and to watch over and constantly care for others, but the first lesson I learned from motherhood was to let go.

Carmen accompanies me from afar: “That’s good advice, talk to her. Caring for a child is overwhelming, not only for the acts themselves, but because it is the ultimate test of detachment. To free oneself from the need to control, and to wait… you feel so free and it turns out that my own serenity is the wellbeing of my daughter, with whom I share my liberty.”

The philosopher Carolina del Olmo wrote in her book Where Is My Tribe? that we live in a society that promotes independence and autonomy while our children pull precisely in the opposite direction. To share one’s freedom with a daughter is to seek out a place where needs and possibilities meet, even if one almost never finds it. It is to accept the interdependence that unifies us, that makes us people. By constantly seeing ourselves mirrored in others, our identity is defined. No identity is constructed individually.

May 12, 2014

I knew my life would change, but it’s hard to accept that it has changed so much and this makes it difficult for me to connect with the baby, except when I bathe her, when we dance together, when I watch her nurse at my breast, when we sleep holding each other. I turn back to my diary and I realize that I referred to her as the baby, the daughter. She still didn’t have a name. Was that part of the reason? That she needed a name, not for her to exist, but for her to mean something to me, so that I could establish a close relationship with her? The essayist Tania Tagle expresses this in her book Germinal, in which she tells the story of the pregnancy and birth of her son Nicolás: “The world did not appear summoned by language, but manifested itself through it. Light was not created by uttering the word, but it became meaningful. For this reason, every once in a while, I murmur the name my son will carry, to start burrowing a little place of meaning for him in the world, to start bringing forth, bit bybit, his meaning.”

June 19, 2014

You slept through most of the night. My breasts emptied their milk onto the sheet, outlining the shape of some old map.

June 27, 2014

Today you are three months old. You like to look at the trees and for people to look you in the eyes. You like George Harrison, strolling through Chapultepec Park, and to play on the swing set with me. I enjoy hugging your warm body, rubbing my nose over your cheeks, and to think that you like being alive.

June 28, 2014

Today, finally, after three months of trying to agree on your name, we filed your birth certificate with the civil registry. We had so many names picked out for you, but we chose Naira. Actually, your grandmother chose it the day you were in the hospital. While we were waiting for news, she was checking her cellphone for names to give you strength, names that could protect you. That’s how she found Naira. We’re not sure of the name’s origin. Some say that in Quechua it means warrior, while others say it’s Aymara and also means woman who sees, woman with wide eyes, and memory.

Right from the start, we liked the sound of it: light, like air. We also liked the fact that your father’s favorite cyclist is named Nairo, Nairo Quintana. Over time, Naira took on the meaning of her name. She’s a cautious child, observant, and she likes silence. I would almost say she likes solitude, but instead, she flees from raucous people and places. She prefers close relationships, steady friendships with other girls. Naira moves through life as though she were carrying a small bird and sheltering it in her chest.

Translated by John Gibler

Fruto: Bearing the Burden of Care is available now from City Lights Books.