What Beatrice’s contempt did was subtler and more corrosive than that.

It came as a thousand tiny signals, spread across years — a slightly warmer smile for a nephew, a question about the next pregnancy asked one time too many, a birthday gift given with a little less thought, a family conversation about the company’s future in which the granddaughters were silently, not mentioned.

No single one of these was a thing a child could point to and say, that hurt me. But together, absorbed daily, from infancy, they teach a girl a lesson underneath language, in the place where a person’s sense of her own worth is formed before she has words: the lesson that she is a disappointment by her very nature, that something about the fact of her is a letdown, that had she only been born a boy she would have been loved more easily and more.

I fought that lesson with everything I had.

I told my daughters the truth so often it must have sounded like a chant.

And I do believe I got through — I believe my girls know, in their bones, that they are wanted and whole and enough.