Gabriela Wiener had her non-biological son as part of a polyamorous relationship between three adults which, after nine years, came to an end as many conventional relationships do. The difference was that upon the dissolution of the bond between them, and their cohabitation, Gabriela’s motherhood was threatened due to the lack of a legal framework for their family structure. The writer and journalist recalls her first years raising her son Amaru and reflects on her “illegitimate” motherhood: a mother–son bond lacking legal acknowledgement, yet nourished by a continuous construction of love.
At that very moment, I was perhaps closer to Amaru’s head than anyone else. From within that inflatable pool, I felt the onset of his body finally reaching the outside world. Unlike the day I gave birth to Coco, this time I remained dressed with my legs closed, but that did not keep me from becoming a mother for the second time. Without contractions, without pushing, accompanying the process in silence or offering words of love. I can still hear that deep splash his drop made. I gathered him in my arms before he could reach the bottom. In that brief period in which I held him, something stirred in me; I instinctively thought of pulling him towards me yet did not do so. I had not been cast in that role.
I was not the one giving birth that morning, and for that very reason, I should not have been the first person to hug him. From my place in the stagnant water, I saw how Amaru took his first mouthful of air, black and blue, whole. I saw him rise above the water, above the body, above the world, and I rushed towards the new adventure of not being the only one for him either.
I am a different sort of mother. From within the bosom of the polyamorous relationship one might call a “thruple”, forged between myself and the bioparents, I acted as the culture’s hinge, the ironwork that held the other two pieces together. In truth, whatever the role, it would be devised between the child and myself, and it would be no less animalistic.
Exclusiveness was an aspect we intended to eschew from our lives. The three of us painstakingly sought him, yearned to have him, chose to bring him into the world, partly as a means of rounding off our theory on dissident love, and partly because these things occur when love attains such intensity. I only used the possessive form – “my son” – in secret, though these were carryovers from the past exiting my mouth.
We wished to raise him away from the sense of private property. Collectivising affection, upbringing, the future. We called him “the Polyamory Messiah” as, with him, a new era came into being, a reappraisal of what comprises a family and what is really important. I unlearned the old forms of expressing tenderness and giving life, replacing them with others that seemed more interesting to me. In the most outlandish dreams of those days, there was talk of all our female friends becoming his mothers. It was not the fruit of our invention: mothers have always taken on the role of caregiver.
Bursting the two-parent bubble
At the first ultrasound appointment, the technician tried to stop me because the appointment was “not open to all and sundry”. We managed to squeeze in, as we would do on so many other occasions – three parents almost fighting for a place that nobody had set aside for us, to view the alien floating in the darkness of the uterus.
When we took him to the civil registry, we had already decided: he would be given our three surnames. We would carve a symbolic notch in the parenting model, while covertly smashing the domain of the binary home. Spanish law permits only two parents, accepting a maximum of two surnames, but mine would be emblazoned on paper, come hell or high water, for all eternity, appearing in every official document of my child’s life, feigning a name and representing a lineage: Amaru Wiener.
“We know more about the air we breathe, the seas we travel, than about the nature and meaning of motherhood”, wrote Adrienne Rich.[1]
Rich, A.C. (1976) Of Woman Born: Motherhood as experience and institution. New York: Norton.
Not being a legal parent, nor the biological, second, adoptive, putative, chosen, stepmother, tutor or guardian, comes with its own idiosyncrasies. Being a polyamorous mother, one not endowed with any recognisable category of motherhood, entails certain levels of imagination.
Although in the first few days after birth, it was child’s play to entertain the boy without resorting to the teat, because he slept most of the day and ate very little, as the weeks passed, he displayed a need for longer and more intensive access to that benchmark body. I wished to be a mother in the most functional sense possible, an essential part of taking care of him alongside his other parents. For this reason, I envisaged myself also being able to breastfeed him. There were four teats – more than enough. Breasts are polyamorous too.
I started researching ways to do it and discovered the relactador, a supplemental nursing system that allows stored breast milk to be delivered through a tube while the baby sucks – on my empty breast in this case – helping the milk-producing mother to rest. But, it turned out to be somewhat cumbersome and unappealing for the baby. I never thought that biological processes were interchangeable, I only longed to be useful and – why try to deny it? – fulfil the mother cyborg’s dream, but we found ourselves in a fiddly procedure that we swiftly abandoned.
My task throughout the years was, as with everything that is not taken as read and not stated in the contract, that of construction. I toiled to build a bond between us as if I was building a treehouse. A place yearned for, almost utopian, called process. And I patiently gathered the materials to accomplish this.
It could not be said that I did anything more or less than any other mother does on a daily basis. By this, I mean nights reading stories (in which I always doubled the number of mothers), strolls, dinners, bath time, putting plasters on wounds, tenderness, and tying that complicated knot in the rebozo to anchor him to my body.
When I gazed upon our joint reflection in the mirror, I became doubly aware of the unwavering responsibility that his life meant in mine. I even broke my shoulder scampering around after him and now those nails and the steel plate in my body also bear the hallmarks of our joint destiny.
Waiting for red tape to clear
I’ll never forget the day Amaru fell over in the square while playing with his cousin and, in tears, ran straight into the arms of his other mother. One of his aunts said: “Of course – there’s only one mother!”
I could have thrown in the towel, before or after each time that someone, almost without realising it, denied my motherhood, yet I stood firm. Throughout the Covid pandemic, we got sick and I became aware of one of the perks of a family like ours in withstanding the disease: more people around to care, more networks to rely on.
However, despite debates and activism from mothers and fathers, the system continues to fall short of pluri-parental families’ needs, as if the format mattered more than the quality of affection and care. Despite a growing body of case law and constitutional rulings recognising three legal parents – especially in Latin America (Argentina, Brazil and Chile have documented rulings in favour) – triple parentage is still taken case by case.
In Spain the debate is active but without any legal recognition: I remain along with the others, in the queue awaiting justice.
No mother is illegitimate
A few weeks ago, we travelled alone – just the two of us, Amaru and I – for the first time to Peru, the country where I was born and which I left more than 20 years ago. We boarded in Madrid thrilled at the thought that this would be the first trip to Lima that Amaru, now 9 years old, would remember. He was too little on previous visits so he only had photos as memories.
I carried an authorisation signed by “his legal parents” so that I could travel around the world with my son. It’s far from a pleasant process, particularly when one has to go through police checkpoints several times and parental binarism continues to act as a border. At one checkpoint, a police officer explained to me at length how I was actually my son’s stepmother.
After nine years together as a “thruple”, we separated three years ago and established shared custody. Amaru spends one week in his other mother’s home and the next in ours, with his father and me. The first thing we did was visit a notary for all three of us to sign paperwork stating that if his biological parents were to die, I would become his guardian, which represents an “almost-legal” way of being his mother.
For now I remain this: a mother who makes him laugh the way no one else does. And although sometimes I still catch myself showing him the video of the birth, secretly wishing he would imprint the memory that I too was inside that pool, waiting for him, he has no doubts. I am his mum.
It’s striking how love does its work and moves things along far faster than the bureaucrats in charge of the child’s supposed best interest. No mother is illegal, but, in the face of the system’s failure, our home stands firm in the tree of life, on the other side of the border.
