motherhood repetitively throughout the novel “During those years she felt as if she were locked forever in a large box with four perpetually exploding egos”.
In The Autobiography of My Mother, Xuela has several substitute mother figures, but none of them were able to fulfill the maternal attachment from a real mother. She was not able to create a real bond with any of them. For Xuela, the most dangerous substitute mother figure was her new step-mother. Her step-mother doesn’t love or like her, and to a further extent she even wanted Xuela dead. Xuela faces the challenges her step-mother gives her, one of the challenges includes degrading her descent to which her step-mother associates it with the French patios. They were the “made-up language