“A huge crocodile in whose jaws you are – that’s the mother”. With this quotation from Lacan, Mónica Ojeda (Ecuador) opens her novel Mandíbula (Jawbone) (2018), in which mother-daughter relationships are at the core of the narrative. This ambivalent image of the mother crocodile, protecting the fruit of her womb between her sharp teeth, recurs in contemporary Spanish and Latin American literature, especially in fictions that draw on the Gothic genre. The purpose of this chapter is to analyse how this figure has a cyclical aspect that is embodied in different avatars following the path of the mother in some contemporary short stories: fertility, gestation and, finally, the deleterious consequences of motherhood on the body through the figures of the mother goddess, the mother of monsters and the zombie mother. The mother crocodile, revisited by women writers, becomes a subversive figure revealing the strengths and pitfalls of motherhood.