Redolent with wicked seductresses and pure maidens, myths have been passed down as sacred and institutionalised texts for centuries, quietly setting unrealistic standards for femininity and motherhood in their respective cultures. These standards are, however, no longer tenable in contemporary contexts for their inflexible and moralistic criterion that feminist theorists like Adrienne Rich have condemned for being ‘defined and restricted under patriarchy.’ Contemporary myth retellings have taken strong exceptions to these restricted portrayals, utilising maternity to unravel the mythic tale and expose the socio-political motivations underlying their construction. This chapter offers a transcultural exploration of how the presentation of alternate maternal perspectives in myth retellings such as Genevieve Gornichec’s The Witch’s Heart and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Forest of Enchantments reject mythic determinations of monstrous motherhood in favour of more complex identities that disrupt the quiet and insidious conditioning of the ‘institution of motherhood,’ both retrospectively and in the present.