The dark face of motherhood comes to light

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It had been 24 hours since Diana Oliver had given birth to her second child, Leo, and she was already sitting in front of a computer working like any other day.

"She put him on my chest and typed as if she hadn't felt that she split me in two a few hours before when her body came out of me," recalls this freelance journalist in

(Arpa).

Oliver's essay reflects on what it is like to have children in today's world, a feat

.

Like Oliver's, many other essays, novels and films have spent years dismantling stereotypes, breaking down taboos and conquering new perspectives from which to talk about being a mother.

"It is no longer an issue

," says the journalist.

If

baptized our time as "liquid modernity", an era marked by changes, uncertainty, the rise of individualism and the disappearance of solid values, Oliver believes that what we are experiencing now are

"In Bauman's liquid societies, everything is susceptible to commodification and privatization, and so it is with the experience of motherhood: we have a very high standard of motherhood that we try to achieve through consumption (books, training, webinars, workshops); the absence of solid ties and the loss of family networks is solved with the outsourcing of care, the impossibility of combining child-rearing work with paid work outside the home is institutionalized and privatized;

.

Caring impoverishes us and isolates us," says Oliver.

Her essay is sprinkled with literary references, both to essays and novels, which in recent years have approached motherhood from new perspectives.

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Literature.

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There are, for example, quotes from Lucia Berlin's

Handbook

, who managed to write while single-handedly raising four children and picking up precarious jobs.

Also from the autobiographical

by

, where the difficulties of motherhood past 40 and the ghost of infertility are addressed;

of

's post-divorce memorial triptych or the much applauded

by

, where infanticide and motherhood as a prison are explored.

Are we experiencing a literary

about other ways of being a mother?

Oliver is of the opinion that far from a fashion, it is a "necessity".

"There was a huge gap and little by little that gap is being filled with poetry, with essays, with fiction novels, with memoirs... There will never be too many books on this subject because at the same time there are many questions that go through it. And many planes from which to approach them. It is

... Until not so long ago, how many books did we have that addressed motherhood in the first person? We were orphans, "he reflects.

In his case,

's

Mora Davey

's

anthology

were especially revealing.

"Lazarre's especially: how a woman with an academic background, who had been a mother in the 70s in a country like the United States, was so close in many ways to a mother today, in Spain, in the 21st century.

, loneliness, ambivalence, guilt, exhaustion are issues that continue to go through our maternity," he says.

The same news is detected in

by

, now out of print, a pregnancy diary with "reflections and emotions that are perfectly identifiable today, almost 40 years later".

One of the novels that has aroused the most buzz since its publication a few months ago in the United States is

by

, starring a woman who one day decides to leave her husband and daughter to embark on a journey back to the territory of her childhood in the Californian desert, a sordid landscape of poverty, casinos, coyotes and OxyContin addicts.

The book has given a lot to talk about because the protagonist has the same name as the author and the coincidences do not end there: as in the novel, the real life Vaye Watkins is also the mother of a girl and her father, Paul Watkins, was the Charles Manson's right-hand man, the one in charge of recruiting the younger girls of the 'family'.

"I wanted to behave like a slightly bad man," says the protagonist after leaving her house,

, before standing in the middle of the desert,

, the most used questionnaire to detect postpartum depression.

Watkins's is not the only woman who abandons her offspring that fiction has given lately.

There is the ultra-award winning

(Movistar+ premieres on July 23) by

, the brilliant adaptation of

's novel that explores the most suffocating side of motherhood, dynamiting taboos in each scene.

"I have two children and by far there has been nothing more challenging in my life in every way, physically, emotionally and spiritually. Why should we expect something so huge to be limited to a set of normal feelings?" Gyllenhaal wondered in an interview, where he claimed to make visible others such as

that are usually buried under the "heartbreaking joy" that being a mother gives.

In

also investigates the turbulent maternity of women such as Doris Lessing, Ingrid Bergman, Gala Dalí or Maria Montessori, who abandoned their children, and reflects on how little social and family pressure has evolved around the mother, emblem of renunciation and sacrifice.

A new and chilling variant has come out of the conversation about being a mother or not, the one that was inaugurated after

in the United States.

Oliver believes that the abortion ban is a "warning" that will condemn thousands of women to unwanted motherhood, poverty and death.

"Our

are always on the line and it is

that maintains them or makes them fall. It seems paradigmatic to me that in a country where abortion is being prohibited, surrogacy is on the rise, "he points out. .

"The woman's body is constantly pierced by violence but also by capitalism. Carme Riera wrote that

It must be like some kind of forced labor.

'Nine months in shackles and handcuffs, life in prison, later.'

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