The story begins the moment the Mother tells the Grandmother that there is going to be a baby: the Baby.         

Lie: the story began a few months earlier, when the Mother found out that there was going to be a baby and kept her mouth shut as she waited for the pregnancy to advance. That was the beginning of all beginnings, a story as old as time, well known by mothers from all over the world. No, that is also not true, or not entirely. To be precise – we will try to be precise narrators – the story would have begun even earlier, with the Mother feeling curious about being a mother for the very first time; with the Grandmother considering far too often the possibilities of her becoming a grandmother, because, as the Mother has recently learned from one of the most famous child psychoanalysts around: ‘babies start existing as soon as they are dreamt of.’

Now this knowledge has been shared with the Grandmother, the Mother understands that the Baby, the surprisingly mobile grape that she and the Father saw just a few days ago on the ultrasound screen, will never again be only hers. She told the Grandmother in a rather unceremonious and hasty manner during one of her visits to the village; the Grandmother’s back faced her as she put away the shopping for the weekend in the fridge. The Mother noticed the accelerated beating in her chest as she let out the phrase, so brief. After those last few months of prudency and discretion, being pregnant seemed to her a secret that was almost too intimate to share. The Mother was not going to confess to the Grandmother the seriousness with which she sought this pregnancy; how this particular desire grew and grew until it weighed more than any of her other desires, before finally convincing her – and the Father – that it was her mission at this stage in her life. ‘Ah,’ said the Grandmother rather neutrally, ‘you always said it wasn’t for you whenever it came up, so I’d told myself it was never going to happen.’ It’s not that she wanted it, or needed it, but the Mother had expected a little more enthusiasm.

Barely a week after the conversation, however, it is the Grandmother and not the Mother who gives in to the impulse to buy the first thing for the Baby. The Mother receives a photo of some white socks for new-borns, classic and delicate, something it would never have occurred to her to buy.

Visits to the maternity ward play out. Blood tests, screenings, scans, percentiles. The Mother lies back on the examination bed with her abdomen exposed and her bladder empty, and anxiously follows the movement of the waves that shift within her and within the Baby like an indecipherable short film. The doctor stops, enlarges, measures; please, please, please, prays the Mother, she prays that every organ, that every bone, that every artery is good. When they are finished she tells the Grandmother, who responds by talking about her own pregnancy, comparing the incomparable. Neither the Mother nor us are at all interested in this far away past, remote and expired. This is not a simple repetition of what the Grandmother has already lived through. ‘Incredible!’ the Mother wants to exclaim during the consultations as she punches her fist into the air. ‘Look what only I am capable of!’, as if she were the superhuman pregnant woman that she feels she has the right to be.

The only prize the Mother receives for her feat is a copy of the blizzard that the machine has captured, blurry print outs in which the Baby’s face always appears to be deformed and incomplete and that don’t serve to respond to the question that everyone but her was starting to ask. ‘Who does it look like?’ the Grandmother wants to know, ‘does it look like our side?’, she insists as she tries to sound unbothered.

You should never underestimate the ability of the sharing of good news to provoke disagreements, making the fortunate fight to the death amongst themselves, especially if they already fought before. The Mother and the Grandmother don’t agree on anything. From the outside it might seem stupid to get angry over the colour of a pram cover – steamboat blue, the Mother has decided; why not celestial purple, the Grandmother suggests again – but those of us who are in the story don’t think so. We also understand the Mother’s anger when the Grandmother makes her doubt what she has read in books and in online articles; when she declares that her face, her hips, her arse are all going to widen; when she crafts unhealthy tales of what might happen if she is not prudent or doesn’t rest; when from month to month she responds with, ‘but is that not a bit small?’, when she is told the Baby’s estimated measurements. No, those kilos and centimetres that are a product of her insides are not a bit small, responds the Mother, a little scared. As for the name… It was to be expected that the Grandmother would prefer a different one.

‘Pregnancy drags,’ the Mother complains. ‘Tell me about it! It feels like it’s dragging by for me too!’ the Grandmother responds, ‘even more than it is for you!’

Babies start existing as soon as they are dreamt of, when other recently made mothers offer us one of those new human beings to hold and we burst with pleasure and envy, immerse ourselves in the light scent they give off, wanting to bury our face in their clothes; they start existing, when, much earlier than even trying to get pregnant, we see them in other kids who are already alive, and kids in films: in that little, curly-haired girl that blows the candles out after everyone has sung happy birthday to her twice, in that little boy in brown dungarees and a woolly jumper who is eating a bag of crisps, gnawing at them. That, that is exactly how ours will be.

The Mother marvels as she watches Petit Maman. Intrigued by its fairy-tale-like premise – exploring the woodland that surrounds the house in which her mother grew up, a little eight-year-old girl meets another girl, identical to her in every way but her clothes – the Father and her had decided it would be the last film they would watch in the cinema before the baby was born. ‘You had me when you were twenty-three years old,’ Nelly tells the girl that we very quickly discover is her mother, Marion, at her age. ‘And? Did I have you because I wanted you?’ Marion replies. ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, I’m not at all surprised, because I already think about you.’ ‘I’ve always thought about you too,’ the Mother tells the Baby.

Babies start existing as soon as they are dreamt of, when other recently made mothers offer us one of those new human beings to hold and we burst with pleasure and envy, immersing ourselves in the light scent they give off, wanting to bury our face in their clothes; they start existing, when, long before even trying to get pregnant, we see them in other kids who are already alive, and kids in films: in that little, curly-haired girl that blows the candles out after everyone has sung happy birthday to her twice, in that little boy in brown dungarees and a woolly jumper who is eating a bag of crisps, gnawing at them. That, that is exactly how ours will be.

The Mother marvels as she watches Petit Maman. Intrigued by its fairy-tale-like premise – exploring the woodland that surrounds the house in which her mother grew up, a little eight-year-old girl meets another girl, identical to her in every way but her clothes – the Father and her had decided it would be the last film they would watch in the cinema before the Baby was born. ‘You had me when you were twenty-three years old,’ Nelly tells the girl that we very quickly discover is her mother, Marion, at her age. ‘And? Did I have you because I wanted you?’ Marion replies. ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, I’m not at all surprised, because I already think about you.’ ‘I’ve always thought about you too,’ the Mother tells the Baby.

Babies start existing as soon as they are dreamt of, but this Baby is finally real. We know that giving birth is a solitary fight in which neither prenatal classes, nor a Pilates ball, the Father, or hypothetical instincts – nor an epidural, if you’re unlucky – help in the slightest; we know that the process of detaching ourselves from each other is very difficult, the most difficult thing we have ever done, and that there once was a moment in which we, like the Mother, believed that after everything, giving birth wouldn’t be that bad, that the pain wouldn’t be  that insufferable, that we would maintain control of our legs, our hips and our pelvis, that we would conquer like gladiators. 

Birth had been horrible. Postpartum is horrible. The monstrous inflammation of the breasts and the weight of them as the milk comes in. The milk flowing of its own accord. The discharge: disposable underwear and changing pads every two hours, pads on the chairs, on the sofa, on the bed – just in case. A fever that is barely contained. Constipation thanks to the iron tablets.

It turns out there are many things that are far worse things than stitches.

It turns out that modesty was going to be the least of it.

From the depths of exhaustion, the Mother looks at the Grandmother with hatred, not understanding why she didn’t warn her about anything. Out of the handful of mothers she knows – a conspiracy of them sustaining the mystery of the postpartum sufferings – without a doubt it suited her most to do so. Maybe she didn’t go through the same things? Is it possible that she’s forgotten about it all?

‘Tell me about it! The caesarean wound… bloody hell, yes that hurt,’ exclaims the Grandmother, and goes back to leaning over the Moses basket.

In the middle of the living room – scrupulously organised by the Grandmother, previously ventilated, illuminated with the appropriate quantity of natural light – the Baby sleeps in the Moses basket. She is tucked in up to the waist, her dark, tentative hair standing on end at the crown of her head, her eyelashes almost invisible, just like the Father’s, and the skin of her hands, always clenched shut, is purplish. And one half of the Mother’s brain is now exclusively employed by worries: ‘Will she get cold?’ ‘It’s also not great if she’s sweating.’ ‘Is she gaining weight?’ ‘I can’t hear her breathing.’

The other half of the Mother’s brain is delirious. In the first days following the birth, despite the pain and bewilderment, and as incredible and contradictory as it may seem – even to us it seems incredible – the Mother immediately wants to be pregnant again, to give birth again a indeterminable number of times, to not stop bringing babies into the world until the eagerness for creation that has possessed her has been satisfied; all she wants is to reproduce and rear; in this new life, in this life after the Baby, there are no longer any more ambitions to be had. More words from the celebrated child psychoanalyst, that we too have read, pursue her thoughts. She speaks of the ‘good enough mother’, also known as the ‘mother of ordinary devotion’: a mother who demonstrates ‘a kind of love so simple that it is almost physical’. To be a simply a ‘good enough mother’, thinks the Mother, would be settling for too little. It would be unpardonable, because it is evident that this Baby – this miracle – deserves an extraordinary mother… If the Grandmother allows, of course.

Officially, the Grandmother’s role, like the Father’s, is to take care of the Mother in her recovery, arrange everything for her comfort, take charge of the infinite amount of little jobs that to the Mother now seem overwhelming and, above all to not interfere with her relationship to the Baby. ‘When a mother has the capacity to be a mother, we should never interfere.’ The Grandmother doesn’t know where the pots are, nor the salt, nor the grater – the Mother, who is not hungry, drags her feet to the kitchen to find them, or to once again show her how to turn on the induction plates, the oven, the washing machine. The Grandmother sweats because of the suffocating heat in the house, she can’t stand the Mother’s slovenliness, she should brush her hair and get dressed, at least for the visitors, and if a request doesn’t interest her, all of a sudden she can’t hear. The Mother can’t stand seeing her take pleasure in the Baby, her Baby. Adoring the Baby, that’s what she has really come to do. Adoring the Baby and telling her what she should do with the Baby, telling her it’s obvious that she still doesn’t know anything, or that what she does know is not working. The Mother is not going to appreciate, far less imitate, the Grandmother’s lullabies and whispers, her expert way – the little round head nestled into her shoulder forming a perfect connection – of soothing the Baby to sleep, because she still aspires to invent her own unique way of being a mother, to forge new, superior maternal customs, her own mythology. ‘You seem annoyed,’ complains the Grandmother daily when she finally remembers to hug the Mother and she wriggles free, ‘I hope the Baby loves me more than you do.’ Before midday the Mother has already run out of steam and ends up falling asleep on the sofa with the Baby in her arms; the Grandmother sits on her left taking photos that later she will share with the family, and she smiles at their sleepiness.

Why do we want to be mothers? Is it impulse? Is it inertia? Is it necessity? Is it simply because we can? Is it so we can love our babies like we wanted our mothers to love us: more than, or just like – or perhaps not even like – sufficiently good mothers? Is it to, like the Mother, let go of the resentment we have for our own mothers that we unconsciously carry in our hearts? We only know one thing: we had a baby and, in those distorted days of postpartum, we returned to being a baby ourselves, incoherent, fickle, without voice or authority.

One afternoon, when she is on the verge of answering the Grandmother back, the Mother stops herself and goes out on a walk by herself, without the Father and without the Baby. The city offers her its usual pleasures, the air smells like the sea, and she has to figure out what she is going to do with the hour or hour and a half that she has decided to grant herself. She could go and eat an ice cream at the port, sat in front of one of those enormous cruises that come and go. She could go and try on some summer clothes with which to substitute the maternity leggings that are still the only thing she wears. She could, if she submits to the choir of subtle sobs that are trapped in her head – sobs that day and night she confuses with the whimpers of the neighbour’s dog, with noises rising from the street – go to her favourite baby clothing store and breathe deeply between the bibs and teethers, the baby clothes and the silicone spoons. Or she could simply walk and return calls, although she feels that what she needs to say, she can’t say to anyone. Call us, we want to tell the Mother. Call us. We have so many interesting stories to tell you, like the one about the girl from your town who took the pushchair down streets full of mud and potholes so as to not cross paths with her mother. Call us. All of the grandmothers, are, to some degree or another, like the Grandmother. Everywhere, there is a grandmother whom one must not contradict, a grandmother whose opinion must be listened to… You call us.

On a nice day, the heavens listen to the Mother like in the past they once listened to us, and the Grandmother makes good on her threat and leaves: the Mother and the Baby can return to being the same person. Like they were in pregnancy, like the psychoanalytic conferences they are obsessed with say they should be, like they always should have been, without a single parenthesis. ‘She is the baby, and the baby is her.’ Now the Grandmother is not here to watch, the Mother dances through the house with the Baby in her arms, singing made up songs, cradling her with her shirt unbuttoned. Now the Grandmother is not here to time her, milking lasts for hours: the Mother locks eyes with the Baby’s strangely mature gaze and settles down. As the Baby that came out of her body sleeps, suckling in her dreams – without knowing how, she has learned to console herself, to send herself to sleep – the Mother cries as she thinks about death, thinks about how she would die for the Baby: out of her and the Baby, the Baby. She thinks about how if the Baby were to die, she too would die, she thinks about the fact that if everything goes right, she will die before the Baby, and, as a result, will not be present for her whole life. She would like to be able to accept this, but she can’t. The Mother doesn’t believe she deserves this punishment. No Mother deserves this punishment.

Now the Grandmother is not here, the Baby is only hers, hers, hers, until, with a list of errands in her pocket, she leaves the house with her and consents to sharing her. The Baby catches everybody’s attention; for everybody she means something; in everybody she causes some sort of effect; everybody turns mute in admiration when, in a café or in the street, the Father or the Mother take her out of the pushchair. Deep down, this situation gratifies the Mother, for whom there is no other option than to get used to this constant relation with strangers; to be kind to the people that approach to talk to her and to the Baby; to – rather than walk away – rest a hand on the shoulder of the children with dirty hands who lean in over the hood of the pram; to smile at the girls who surprise her by trying to get the Baby’s attention behind her back. At the end of a particularly placid day, a little girl asks the Mother if the Baby was born that very day. ‘No,’ giggles the Mother. But receiving that question is like going back to witness her birth. When she gets home the Mother sends the Grandmother a photo of the Baby in the white socks.

Feed the Baby eight times a day. Change the nappy very often to avoid irritation. Check that she is weeing with enough frequency. Examine the colour and consistency of her poo. Bathe her one day, and the next no. Put her in clean clothes. Quickly hand wash the dirty clothes to get the poo stains out. Put the Moses basket at the side of the bed during the night. Rock the Moses basket so she falls asleep. Cradle her when she wakes. Go out on a walk with her to get some air. Do the shopping. The mythical makes way for the functional; the exceptional mother for the sufficiently devoted mother. Disorder and dirt reign, there is no longer a clean or milk-wall-less surface remaining. Lately, the Mother has been calling the Grandmother daily, and almost never for a concrete motive, like mothers do with their mothers, like in a given moment we started to do with ours. Ever since the Father has started working again, the Mother spends a large part of the day alone, a day of infinite duration, during which, invariably, she hasn’t the time to anything, and during which sometimes she is not even happy. ‘It’s as if I’m wishing the days away, hoping that something I know will never happen, happens,’ confesses the Mother. ‘Tell me about it!’ the Grandmother starts to say, but then suddenly she stops herself, ‘why don’t you come to the village? I’ve got everything here, even a crib.’

The Baby has gained weight. The Mother’s body has scarred, and the trauma of the birth is dissipating. During the first night in the village, the Mother and the Grandmother sit down in the dark, in silence at the foot of a loaned crib – the Baby is aware it’s not hers. She is on the edge of sleep. Now that the Grandmother is here watching over her – she couldn’t trust any other person – the Mother can allow herself to go out and try to have fun with her friends. ‘Oh, how precious she is!’ says the Grandmother, just what the Mother is thinking. And although it was her intention to give the Baby a goodbye kiss, it is the Grandmother she kisses.

The story ends with this precious moment, with the Mother mistakenly kissing the Grandmother; with the Mother and the Grandmother making peace. The Grandmother promises to never say ‘Tell me about it!’ again.

Lie: the story ended a few weeks earlier, with the Mother slowly beginning to acquire the gifts of patience, joy and perspective, learning to not take any notice of the Grandmother’s comments; with the Grandmother, after the novelty of the birth of the Baby had worn off, progressively losing interest in continuously giving her opinion.

No, that is also not true, or not entirely. To be precise – we said we were going to try to be precise narrators – this story never ends, because it is impossible to share a bond so strong, like the union with the Baby, and not fight due to it, especially if you already fought before. The Mother and the Grandmother will forever continue to measure their strengths and maintain their discrepancies, behaving sometimes like allies and others like enemies. This story does not end, it goes much further than them and carries on into the future, to when the Mother becomes the Grandmother and the Baby becomes the Mother. The story never ends, it is a story as old as time, well known by mothers from all over the world.

---

‘Tell Me About It’ is taken from the collection From Outside (Ser de Fuera).

Raquel Delgado was born in Valladolid in 1988. She has a degree in Journalism and Audio-Visual Communications and a Masters in Political and Corporate Communications. She grew up in Vitoria, and currently lives in A Coruña. Ser de Fuera is her first book.

Alice Banks is a translator from Spanish and French based in Madrid. She has translated authors such as Ali Zamir, Elizabeth Duval, Almudena Grandes, and Cristina Araújo Gámir. She is currently working on a co-translation of Lara Moreno’s latest novel, La ciudad, with Katie Whittemore (forthcoming with Open Letter) and a translation of Anne Sénès’ Chambre double, which will be published in June 2025 with Orenda Books.