But my anxieties didn’t disappear. I observed my daughters when they weren’t paying attention, I felt for them a complicated alternation of sympathy and antipathy. Bianca, I sometimes thought, is unlikable, and I suffered for her. Then I discovered that she was much loved, she had girl and boy friends, and I felt that it was only I, her mother, who found her unlikable, and was remorseful. I didn’t like her dismissive laugh. I didn’t like her eagerness to always claim more than others: at the table, for example, she took more food than everyone else, not to eat it but to be sure of not missing anything, of not being neglected or cheated. I didn’t like her stubborn silence when she felt she was wrong but couldn’t admit her mistake.

You’re like that, too, my husband told me. Maybe it was true, what seemed to me unlikable in Bianca was only the reflection of an antipathy I felt for myself. Or no, it wasn’t so simple, things were more tangled. Even when I recognized in the two girls what I considered my own good qualities I felt that something wasn’t right. I had the impression that they didn’t know how to make good use of those qualities, that the best part of me ended up in their bodies as a mistaken graft, a parody, and I was angry, ashamed.