My Mother's Daughter

Sometimes, at school, the other children ask around about their families, and some say that they have two brothers and a sister, and others that they have two sisters and a brother; and so it goes on, until they come to me, and I have to say that my mother has just the one, single daughter, and that's all there is to us, at which point a general hush descends, and they make a way for me, as if I had just delivered a rousing speech, and they need time alone to reflect upon it. What I don't add, though, is that this daughter of hers doesn't please her so well, on which account I myself often wish she could have been somebody else. Her features are soft and delicate, yet there is something not altogether right about them; their softness is somehow impersonal, as though they had developed at the expense of individuality, rather than in response to it, leaving you with the overall impression of a child completely lost within the world. Yet, even if she perceives this, it does little to subdue her spirit, since she is also as every bit lost within herself; perhaps she even takes a kind of solace from her state. Who can say who lost her way first, she in the world or she in herself, or even if the two are reciprocal, and what is left, in her, is some kind of answer to that lack, some kind of perturbed reflection of the conflict between the two? Her calmness inspires me, and yet I would not want to live long inside her head. It would remind me too much of a room without furniture, which you can't escape because they forgot to put a handle on the door.