a man sadly believes that his mother had gold-digging elements in her character. to avoid repeating his parent’s painful divorce, he decides to find a professionally ambitious woman, one who couldn’t possibly be a gold digger because she doesn’t even want to get married, & marry her. he succeeds. with the arrival of their daughter they find themselves slotted neatly into gender roles.
his wife feels love not as an enchantment but as the lifting of a curse. she can’t believe what her plans used to be. she doesn’t want her daughter to be what she herself used to be, back when she first met her husband, the ambitious reserved tomboy, back when she was so afraid of love. she wants to raise her daughter with more trad values than she herself was raised with. but of course, to her husband, the woman she was when they first met, that ambitious reserved tomboy, is the woman he fell in love with, the woman whom he wanted to see repeated in his children.
each parent’s love for the other creates in them an opposite ambition for their child. the child grows to find this very exhausting.