Motherhood is not a static role, but a Relational Field; a living space where two freedoms meet and take shape together. Drawing on Simone de Beauvoir’s insight that “to will oneself free is also to will others free,” we can think of the mother as the one who delivers not only a body into the world but another freedom. Yet this act of giving life is not unilateral. The mother and child co-constitute the relational space in which both must learn to live their freedom through the encounter with the Other's.
In this sense, motherhood is not reducible to biological or social function. It is an existential relation that constantly negotiates the tension between dependence and autonomy, attachment and separation. The child’s emergence as a free being presupposes the mother’s own capacity to experience herself as a free subject rather than as an instrument of another’s life. Only when the mother has come to recognise her own subjectivity, her right to desire, to limit, to say no and yes from her own ground can she create a relational field where the child’s freedom may unfold without threat.
Thus, motherhood becomes a site of reciprocal becoming: a dynamic interplay of presence and withdrawal, care and letting-be. It invites us to rethink freedom not as independence, but as co-constituted as an event that arises in the fragile, evolving field between selves.
