This was around the time, my mother would say later, that my father fell in love with me. “He was in awe of you,” she said, but I don’t remember it. I noticed he was around more and grabbed me and tried to pick me up even when I didn’t want to be picked up. He had opinions about my clothes and teased me more about whom I would marry. “I wish you’d been my mother,” my father said to her, strangely, one afternoon, as she was preparing lunch and I was playing. Another time he said, “You know she’s more than half me, more than half my genetic material.” The announcement caught my mother off guard.
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