Leda's Conflict over Motherhood

Leda’s conflict over motherhood is not a simple opposition between love and rejection: care for her daughters coexists with exhaustion, anger, guilt, and a persistent desire for a life of her own. Across memories of pregnancy, domestic life, separation, and her encounter with Nina, motherhood appears both as an intimate bond and as a demand that can displace Leda’s work, body, and sense of self.

Ideals of pregnancy and bodily estrangement

Leda recalls her first pregnancy as a project she could shape. Unlike the women in her family, whose pregnancies she understood as physically transformative, she wanted to remain active and in control. She followed medical instructions, continued her intellectual work, and treated the unborn child as already individual: she spoke to the baby, played music, and read and translated texts for her. Bianca’s birth seemed to confirm this ideal. Holding her daughter briefly, Leda experienced what she remembered as the most intense pleasure of her life.

That account stands in sharp contrast to Leda’s memory of carrying Marta. She could not make the second pregnancy meaningful in the same way or transform it into an affirming intellectual or emotional experience. The contrast troubled her not only because the pregnancies felt different, but because the later experience seemed to undo the confident story she had made of the first. Leda had imagined motherhood as something she could consciously guide; her changing response to pregnancy exposed the limits of that control.

Her reflections also unsettle the idea that a child simply reproduces the mother. Looking at Elena, the daughter of Nina, Leda considers how adults search a child’s features for resemblance to her parents, even though a child is also the unpredictable result of many generations and chance. Leda says she had wanted Bianca, but recognizes that wanting a child did not mean she could determine what motherhood would make of her. Her daughters’ bodies and personalities could feel familiar and alien at once.

Care, work, and the limits of patience

In the years when Bianca and Marta were small, Leda found care difficult to reconcile with study and rest. Marta slept poorly, Bianca wanted constant company, and attempts to take Bianca to day care were complicated by illness. Leda tried to remain patient and to be a good mother, including by joining Bianca’s games in which the child cared for her as if she were a doll. Yet Leda was tired, unable to study as she wished, and frequently interrupted when Marta needed attention. When she left Bianca’s game to tend to the baby, she experienced the interruption as a kind of relief, while also feeling that she had abandoned the older child.

The memory of giving Bianca her childhood doll, Mina, further reveals the instability of Leda’s maternal role. She offered the doll as a gift, hoping Bianca would cherish it, but Bianca preferred another toy. Later, after finding Mina treated carelessly, Leda took the doll back and threw it from the balcony. She remembered the act as a moment of cruel satisfaction, followed by holding and kissing Bianca. The sequence joins attachment and anger rather than resolving one into the other: Leda could want to comfort her daughter and still act in a way that frightened and hurt her.

Leda also remembers a separate episode in which work intruded on family life. While she was struggling to write an academic essay, five-year-old Bianca struck her ear during an uncertain interaction. Leda responded by striking Bianca several times and sending her out of the room. She understands the episode as real violence, not as a lesson or a game, and recalls the child’s distress. Her account connects the outburst to the narrow time she felt she had for research, professional recognition, and financial independence, without treating those pressures as an excuse for what she did.

Daughters, resemblance, and inherited anger

Leda’s feelings toward Bianca and Marta remain mixed even when they are no longer young children. She sometimes finds Bianca’s behavior unlikeable and then wonders whether she is reacting to qualities she recognizes in herself. At other times, she feels that the traits she values most in her daughters are those she does not experience as her own: features inherited from their father, unknown ancestors, or chance. Closeness can therefore bring relief from responsibility for their characters, but their troubles and grievances repeatedly return Leda to the feeling that she is both the source of their suffering and the person expected to receive it.

The daughters also understand their mother as having distributed her gifts unfairly. Marta feels that Bianca received the better share, and Leda suffers as she watches Marta’s insecurity. These accusations make motherhood a continuing negotiation over resemblance, inheritance, and perceived favoritism. Leda’s recollections do not settle which daughter has been treated more fairly; instead, they show how bodily similarities and differences become charged with claims about love and deprivation.

A small domestic skill becomes another measure of that inheritance. Bianca admired the care with which Leda peeled fruit in one unbroken strip and repeatedly asked her to make a snake from the peel. When Bianca tried the task herself and cut her finger, Leda was frightened and angry. She delayed comforting her, wanting to establish that the task was dangerous and belonged to an adult. In retrospect, the episode exposes a contradiction: Leda wanted to be admired and imitated, yet resented the demands and risks that came with being the person her daughter copied.

Separation, autonomy, and return

Leda’s departure from her daughters belongs to the same conflict, though it also gives her a sense of release. When distance prevented her from intervening directly in their lives, calls were hurried and requests felt less burdensome. She began working according to her own schedule, correcting papers at night, sleeping in the afternoon, and eating alone nearby. Within months, she felt changed in her habits and appearance and less troubled by her students. Her account presents separation as a period of unusual well-being, not as proof that her attachment to her daughters had vanished.

The separation also intensified her fear that Bianca and Marta would be returned to the family and city from which Leda herself had tried to escape. She had asked Gianni not to leave them with her relatives in Naples, but when work or travel overwhelmed him, he took them to Leda’s mother for extended stays. Leda knew this was happening and regretted it, yet did not return. Later, she accused her mother of passing on the injuries of that family world, despite acknowledging that her mother had cared for the girls and worn herself out doing so. Leda’s anger toward her mother thus echoes the demands and resentments that recur in her own maternal memories.

Academic opportunity sharpened the conflict between care and self-directed work. Before leaving for a four-day conference in London, Leda arranged food, visits from friends, and backup childcare in case Gianni had work obligations. Afterward, she devoted herself to university work and pursued professional opportunities with renewed intensity. Her daughters were present during calls related to that work, and Leda later remembered their bewilderment. The episode shows the practical labor required to make professional activity possible, as well as the emotional cost of pursuing it while responsible for young children.

Nina and the recognition of maternal ambivalence

On the beach, Leda initially observes Nina and Elena as a closely attached mother and child. Nina tends to Elena, plays with her, and attends to her doll; the extended family also helps care for them. But Leda later witnesses moments when Elena’s demands overwhelm Nina. Rosaria takes the child into her arms, and Elena accepts her aunt’s comfort while Nina expresses the need for a little rest. The scene gives Leda an immediate example of care being shared and of a mother reaching the limits of her patience.

The doll makes that parallel personal. Leda takes Elena’s doll and, while examining it, recalls her own pregnancies and the difficult years when Bianca and Marta were small. She recognizes that the doll is bound up with Nina and Elena’s affection, yet cannot bring herself to return it at once. When Nina discovers that Leda had the doll while Elena was distressed, she confronts her for watching without helping. Leda identifies herself as an unnatural mother; Nina takes the doll and ends their association. The exchange does not provide a final judgment on Leda’s character. Instead, it brings her conflict into the open: she can recognize another mother’s distress and still fail to act, just as her own history holds tenderness beside withdrawal and harm.