In Eswatini, policies that advocate community-based care of children affected by AIDS promote non-biological motherhood, by encouraging women to raise their relative’s children as their own. We conducted community-based participatory research about families’ capacities to care for children involving an ethnographic survey and observations in homesteads, in a rural area of Eswatini. Participants, who were mainly women who headed the homesteads, were encouraged to comment on issues of importance to them that were not covered by the survey, during informal conversations. These issues were recorded as ethnographic field notes. These data revealed gender-discriminatory social norms left numerous mothers unable to take their biological children with them, when they married and moved to live with men who were not the children’s biological fathers. They left their children in their mothers’ (the children’s grandmothers’) care. Of the 126 homesteads in the community, seven included a grandmother who mentioned that she was caring for a grandchild whose mothers had married, and three included a mother who reported having left their biological child/ren at their mothers’ homes when they married a man who was not the biological father of their child/ren. One woman, who had defied social norms and brought another man’s child into her marital home, reported being afraid to leave her child with her mother-in-law because she though the mother-in-law hated her child and might harm them in her absence. The biological mothers who had to leave their children behind upon marrying, had limited contact with and provided limited financial support to their children, partly because of social norms that limit women’s economic independence and require their commitment to their marital families. Gender-discriminatory social norms profoundly influence motherhood experiences, and limit women’s choices about how they mother their children, in Eswatini.