As much as I desperately wanted to be like my father, I knew that I was meant to be an extension of my indestructible mother: a do-over to make real the life that she deserved and should have had.
Hope's father was a scientist and her mother always had a dream to study literature. Despite Hope's dream to be a scientist like her father she at first applied to study literature, to accomplish her mother's wish. This sort of idea that daughters are an extension of their mothers, or that mothers should live through their daughters was a "curse" that was heavily thematized in literature towards the end of the twentieth century.
Something so hard can be so easy if you just have a little help. In the right place, under the right conditions, you can finally stretch out into what you are supposed to be.
The author discusses seedlings and their process of becoming a plant by expanding under right conditions. In her writing she relates these biological processes to her own experiences and, in this case, to her own leap into what she was always supposed to be.
Along the way, we also managed to become adults without ceasing to be children.
The author ends her autobiography looking back at her journey with her best friend to get here where she is supposed to be. Despite the difficulties, the journey paid off. She and Bill became adults but kept their ability to dream and to not take themselves seriously, like children.
