Research on Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) programs increasingly pays attention to reintegration’s gendered dynamics and the position of women ex-combatants in this process. Nevertheless, there is scant attention to how DDR fails to make the connection between the private and public spheres of ex-combatants’ lives, and to how DDR programs understand family relations mainly with respect to women’s role as mothers. Men’s roles as husbands and fathers have been studied even less. This article contributes original empirical data on the reincorporation process of the former FARC-EP guerrillas in Colombia. Based on long-term ethnographic research in Colombia’s northeastern region, it shows how the lack of attention to familial ties and parenthood – instead of only motherhood – hampers women ex-combatants’ possibilities for economic and political reincorporation. The article explores women’s experience of motherhood in the FARC-EP and after disarmament, describing how the complexities of re-unifying broken families and the challenges posed by the so-called FARC-EP ‘baby-boom’ are mainly experienced by women, due to essentialist understandings of gender and family. Combined with the near-absolute lack of attention for masculinities and men’s caring and household tasks, this places a heavy burden on women with potential emotional and legal consequences.