A deeply unsettling documentary about motherhood, womanhood and the dangerous things that happen when a woman is taught that having a child is the only way to be enough.
There is something almost cruel about the question, “When are you having kids?”
A Child of My Own Review: The Question
The question of babies/kids is usually thrown around casually, at weddings, dinners or during awkward conversations with relatives you barely know. Sometimes it comes disguised as concern, sometimes as a joke, and sometimes as a very obvious demand. But what really happens when the question stops being a question and starts becoming the entire measure of a woman’s worth?
That is where Maite Alberdi’s A Child of My Own documentary finds its uncomfortable territory. The Netflix documentary, which premiered on August 13, follows the extraordinary real-life story of Eleonor Alejandra Marin Mendoza, aka Ale, a Mexican woman who suffered three miscarriages before faking pregnancy.
What begins as an elaborate lie spirals into the “abduction of a newborn” and a scandal that followed her for years. The director Maite Alberdi, through this documentary, has asked what happens when motherhood becomes less of a choice and more of a social obligation, which makes A Child of My Own more interesting than the crime at the centre.
A Woman Who Was Never Allowed to Simply Grieve
Ale’s story is horrifying, but Alberdi refuses to introduce her as a monster and move on. The film instead takes us back to the woman she was before the crime: newly married, desperate to become a mother and increasingly suffocated by the expectations surrounding her. After multiple miscarriages, Ale does not simply have to deal with grief, but she has to deal with everyone else’s reaction to that grief.
Her husband’s family expects a baby; her marriage is basically wrapped in the expectation of motherhood. Her mother-in-law’s constant nagging becomes a haunting reminder that her body is apparently failing at the one thing everyone has decided it should be doing, which is where the film becomes painfully recognisable.
Women are so often taught that motherhood is the natural next step: get married, have a baby, build a family. This is handed over like a to-do list so deeply embedded that there is almost no space left for the possibility that a woman would be grieving, struggling, undecided, childfree or simply not ready.
For Ale, the pressure becomes unbearable, and she lies. She fakes the entire pregnancy: gains weight, allows everyone around her to believe that a baby is growing inside her, and she even lives through a baby shower, built completely on a lie; a fake pregnancy.
It sounds absurd, and the documentary highlights the absurdity, but also shows that below the bizarre circumstances is something deeply sad: Ale has reached a point where pretending to be pregnant feels easier than admitting that she has lost another pregnancy
A Child of My Own Is Really About Agency
This part of the film, for me, is the most compelling. A Child of My Own is not really asking whether Ale wanted to be a mother. She obviously did. The more difficult question is whether she was ever allowed to decide what motherhood really meant to her.
There is a difference between wanting a child and being made to feel worthless without one, and Alberdi keeps pricking the distinction. Ale’s choices become increasingly extreme, and the film never asks to excuse them. The eventual kidnapping of a newborn is a crime, a fact that the documentary does not magically erase because we understand where Ale’s desperation came from. She was sentenced to more than 13 years in prison.
Understanding the circumstances is not the same as forgiving the action, and that distinction is exactly what makes the documentary uncomfortable. You can look at Ale and think, “What on earth is she even doing?” and perhaps in the same breath ask, “Why did everyone around her make motherhood the only acceptable way to live?”
Both questions can exist, and that is exactly the grey area Alberdi works at with A Child of My Own.
The Mother-In-Law Is Not Just a Side Character
One of the most infuriating elements of A Child of My Own is the pressure from her husband’s family: the nagging, comments, expectations all of that matters because that is how societal pressure usually works. It rarely arrives as one five-page-long speech. It enters as comments, little questions, reminders that somebody is waiting for you to perform womanhood correctly.
The mother-in-law does not need to physically force Ale into anything; the expectation itself harms, and that makes the film’s treatment of family particularly interesting. The family wants a baby, but the emotional consequences of the desire are largely carried by the woman. Her body is a battleground, miscarriages become her shame, and her pregnancy is something everyone gets to monitor.
The imbalance particularly forms the core of the film. Everyone wants the baby, but very few seem interested in what the woman carrying the expectation is actually going through.
The Film Does Not Hand Us an Easy Villain
This is where the style of A Child of My Own becomes really effective. The documentary is not presented like a straightforward true-crime documentary. It blends interviews, archival materials, CCTV footage, and a dramatisation of events with Ana Celeste portraying Ale and Armando Espitia playing her husband Arturo.
We spend a significant portion of the documentary inside the recreated version of Ale’s story before it pulls apart what we have been shown. The distinction between memory, testimony and objective truth becomes slippery, which is perhaps deliberate.
Ale’s version of events and Mayra’s (biological mother of the baby, who was kidnapped by Ale) version of events are significantly different. The documentary eventually contradicts what happened to the baby and whether Mayra had actually agreed to give up her child, which makes the audience reconsider the story we have already emotionally invested in.
The film asks us to empathise with Ale while also reminding us that empathy does not require us to be blind.
Ana Celeste’s Performance Leads the Film
Ana Celeste is particularly important because so much of the first half of the documentary depends on dramatisation. Ale could very easily become a caricature: the desperate woman who lies about being pregnant and steals the baby at last. Celeste does not play her that way.
There is embarrassment, desperation, exhaustion from keeping a lie alive in her performance, and there are moments when the ridicule even turns funny for some seconds. The tonal shift in Alberdi’s direction is a strange but really effective choice here.
But There Is One Problem
There is a risk of perspectives being pushed into the background. The real Mayra, whose baby was taken, becomes a figure difficult to centre because the film’s primary concern is around Ale and the social forces surrounding her, and that creates an uncomfortable imbalance.
The woman who lost her baby becomes part of a larger conversation about another woman’s desperation, which is a complicated choice. The film itself is complicated and does not solve it.
Perhaps that is the point. I am not negating the fact that Mayra and her husband were a part of the documentary and their perspective was heard, but I still wish A Child of My Own spent a little more time exploring the emotional aftermath for the people on the other side rather than returning so frequently to her perspective.
A Film About Women Without Turning Anyone Into Saint
What stayed with me the most about the documentary is that it does not whitewash anyone. Most often the central woman either becomes the victim or the villain, but A Child of My Own leaves it in the grey area.
Ale is complicated yet more ordinary than both labels. Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the documentary itself is not that Ale wanted a child so much but that she eventually committed a terrible crime.
It is the world around her that convinced her that not having a baby meant she was incomplete, which in itself is a big story and the reason why the documentary lingers.
Final verdict
A Child of My Own is messy, uncomfortable and occasionally frustrating, but the messiness is what makes it worth watching.
Maite Alberdi takes what could have been a sensational story and turns it into a more intimate conversation about grief, marriage, family, motherhood, womanhood and the exhausting pressure that is placed on women to become mothers.
It asks us to understand her without cheering for her choices, and perhaps that is the most important act of agency here; to finally allow Ale to exist as a complicated woman rather than a headline.
Watch A Child of My Own on Netflix and tell us your thoughts.
Also Read:
