[I was dead, but came back to life: the meaning of motherhood for adolescent girls with a history of living in the streets].

The discovery of sexuality by adolescent girls living in the streets generally involves lack of knowledge about their own bodies, often resulting in risk behaviors for sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy. This study aimed to identify the meanings ascribed to motherhood by teenage girls with a history of living in the streets and who chose to assume the care for their children, off the streets. Based on a qualitative methodology, data were collected from the adolescent mothers at a nongovernmental shelter and analyzed according to the content analysis modality. The results were discussed using the category "new life: mother & child", showing that the adolescents ascribed a positive meaning to motherhood, with the child seen as both a "savior" from the mother's certain death on the streets and a repository for the mother's expectations for a better future. The article concludes by analyzing motherhood as an opportunity for establishing new ways of being in (and relating to) the world, with the construction of this motherhood process as a potentially fertile ground for intervention by health professionals.