What remains of a woman when motherhood occupies all her space, both intimate and social? Why, today as yesterday, is the reassuring figure of the mother still preferred to the more complex and uncomfortable one of a woman as a desiring subject? “A mother cannot be everything to a daughter or son without losing much of herself and without taking away a great deal from them,” writes the author. Yet, today more than ever, mothers are immersed in an idealizing narrative that exalts them precisely because they are sacrificial. But a society that idolizes the mother and removes the woman has a penalizing impact on the fulfillment of all women, both collectively and privately, and still too many women who have not had children consider themselves failures.
 
“In every woman there is an enigma, something opaque even to herself: a blind spot we try to enter.”
Through clinical cases, psychoanalytic, literary, and cinematic references, and the stories of exemplary figures such as Maria Callas, Camille Claudel, and Lou Andreas-Salomé, the author reflects on the complexity and fluctuations of being a woman in an attempt to articulate motherhood in a new way: a “feminist motherhood” that does not negate femininity but integrates it, a transformative experience capable of enriching a woman's life without stifling her creativity and passion. “Motherhood is not alienation if it remains permeated by a woman's desire. And so a mother knows how to watch her children leave, because she herself is still on a journey.”