Motherhood and selfhood

Motherhood and selfhood are bound together in the novel as competing claims on Leda’s time, body, desire, and sense of who she is. Her account refuses both the ideal of maternal devotion as effortless fulfillment and the easy condemnation of a mother who leaves: care can be affectionate and exhausting, while escape can bring relief without erasing attachment or consequence.

The Body, Work, and Maternal Identity

Leda’s understanding of motherhood begins in the bodily experience of pregnancy and in the circumstances in which she became a mother. Bianca was born when Leda was twenty-three, as she and Gianni struggled to keep university jobs. Two years later, amid the assumption that Bianca needed a sibling, Leda planned to have Marta. She recalls pregnancy as a life that is hers and yet is already moving toward another person: an experience at once joyful and weighty, but also alienating. The child’s resemblance to her parents, she reflects, can encourage adults to treat a child as an extension of familiar identities, even though the child is also new and ungovernable matter.

That bodily division finds a parallel in the division between intellectual ambition and the labor of care. While raising the girls, Leda could not study as she wished; Marta’s crying interrupted her, and the interruption could feel like release from Bianca’s demands. In one early memory, Bianca made Leda lie beneath the kitchen table and cared for her as though she were a doll. Leda was tired, but tried to remain patient and to be a good mother. When Marta cried in another room, Leda stopped the game and went to her, feeling almost innocent because the younger child seemed to have pulled her away from the older one. Her tenderness and her desire to escape the demands of care appear in the same scene.

The childhood doll Mina further complicates the boundary between maternal giving and personal possession. Leda gave Bianca her own old doll, hoping the gift would ease the child’s envy of Marta. Bianca preferred a different doll, and Leda felt hurt. Later, finding Bianca sitting on Mina while playing with another toy, Leda scolded her and insisted that the doll was precious because it belonged to her own childhood. The episode makes maternal generosity inseparable from Leda’s attachment to a self that existed before motherhood: even a gift to her daughter can carry an expectation of recognition and reciprocal feeling.

Care, Strain, and Ambivalence

The narrative also records moments when Leda’s strain becomes active harm rather than inward resentment. During a winter afternoon spent trying to finish an essay, Bianca struck her while Leda was distracted by work and by the limited time available for research. Leda hit her daughter in response; what began as a reaction became deliberate violence, and Leda sent Bianca out of the room. The scene does not present maternal exhaustion as an excuse that cancels the injury to the relationship. Instead, it places the pressures of intellectual work and domestic care beside Leda’s responsibility for what she does under those pressures.

Years later, Nina’s accusation about a different moment of maternal distress gives that conflict another form. Nina says that Leda had kept the doll while Nina was overwhelmed by Elena’s crying and had not intervened or helped. Leda accepts the charge that she is an unnatural mother, and Nina takes the doll and breaks with her. The exchange links Leda’s private history to another mother’s immediate difficulty: Leda can recognize the force of maternal desperation, yet her recognition has not necessarily become help. Motherhood is therefore not only a question of love or identity, but also of the specific acts of care withheld, offered, or demanded between women.

Separation and the Recovery of a Self

Leda’s departure from her daughters develops over time, as professional possibility and personal desire press against the routines of family life. Before leaving for an academic conference in London, she arranged food, childcare, and visits in meticulous detail, even though Marta had a slight cold. The preparations show that departure did not begin as an absence of practical concern. After the conference, however, Leda entered an intense period of work and travel. She spent long days at the university, pursued opportunities connected with Professor Hardy, and told Gianni that she was leaving him. She later recalls that she could not honestly explain how much she wanted a life organized around her own study and desire.

The departure became concrete when Leda left Bianca and Marta, then six and four, with Gianni. She was away for two months without calling. When she returned, it was to pack her books and notes, not to resume family life; from that point she did not see or hear from the girls for three years. At the moment of leaving, Bianca and Marta asked her to make them a snake from an orange peel. Leda completed the task and then walked out. Their ordinary request for a shared bit of play stands against the future she believed was opening beyond the household, and the abruptness of her exit makes the cost of that choice visible.

The later move of the daughters to Toronto reveals a different stage of separation. Leda is surprised not to feel upset; instead, she feels light, as though she has only then definitively brought them into the world. For the first time in nearly twenty-five years, she is free of the daily anxiety of taking care of them. The house is orderly and nearly empty, the household helper has left for better-paid work, and Leda does not replace her. Her contact with the girls is largely by telephone. They ask for practical help, including advice about clothes and the sending of papers, while their calls remain hurried and emotionally uneven. Distance makes Leda’s responses feel less consequential to her, turning requests into gestures she experiences as affectionate habit rather than immediate obligation.

Relief, Loss, and the Meaning of Return

Leda describes the years after separation as a period of striking change. She corrects students’ papers at night, sleeps in the afternoon, and eats at a nearby trattoria; she no longer arranges her work around her daughters’ schedules. Within months, she feels physically and intellectually renewed. A colleague notices that she has become less distracted and more generous, while Leda herself feels that her thoughts have recovered their proper speed. These details make selfhood tangible not as an abstract declaration but as a changed daily rhythm, renewed concentration, and a changed relation to work.

Yet relief does not mean that the separation is emotionally empty. When Nina asks why Leda left, Leda explains that she loved her daughters so much that she feared love for them would prevent her from becoming herself. She remembers feeling good without them, even as she experienced herself as coming apart and felt an unbearable absence. She was not, she says, simply sad; still, she felt a weight in her stomach and her heart reacted whenever she heard a child call for a mother. The account holds together contentment, bodily distress, and involuntary recognition of maternal need rather than resolving them into one feeling.

Leda also distinguishes the motive for leaving from the motive for returning. She says she returned when she understood that she could not create anything of her own that truly equaled her daughters, but rejects Nina’s interpretation that she came back out of love for them. She presents both departure and return as acts undertaken for love of herself. That explanation does not make the effects on her daughters disappear; instead, it shows how Leda tries to narrate motherhood without surrendering the claim to an independent identity. Her repeated insistence that escape can be necessary for survival sits beside the record of what escape required from Bianca and Marta.

Narrative Significance

The novel makes motherhood and selfhood legible through contrasts rather than a final moral verdict: the mother who plays patiently with a child and the mother who sends her away; the gift that is also a claim on personal history; the carefully arranged departure followed by years without contact; the relief of solitude alongside the bodily signs of absence. Leda’s account also differs from her memory of Leda’s Mother, who threatened to leave but never did. Leda carries the threat into action, and that difference shapes how she understands her own life and her daughters’ experience of it.

By allowing Leda to explain herself while preserving the concrete consequences of her choices, the narrative keeps maternal love from functioning as either an acquittal or a complete identity. Leda’s freedom is real, as are her fatigue, attachment, failures of care, and need to make a life beyond motherhood. Selfhood does not emerge as a clean escape from maternal responsibility; it remains entangled with the children she left, the work she pursued, and the story she tells about why she went and why she returned.