Still, as always, thinking about how Veth's story is such a complex look at womanhood and motherhood and what it means to be a woman and a mother who wants things. Because Veth's story is about wanting, just as much as it's about learning to be brave. Veth presumably comes from a very traditional small town, married her (effectively) high school sweetheart when she was quite young and had a child almost immediately, which, while based on love, might also have been an effort to fit in and become an independent adult in her town, away from the mockery of her brothers. The things people in town didn't like about her were her strangeness and her collections of bits and bobs and oddities. The shiny things that she wanted. In some ways, that was the wedge between her and her community, the strangeness of how she desired things and wantonly kept them. Even marrying and having a kid so young could be an extension of this. Veth wants things and strives to get them
All of that in heightened after she's turned into goblin. It becomes "the itch" to steal and to horde shiny, beautiful things, which is particularly poignant considering how ugly she finds herself, even uglier than she thought of herself when she was still a halfling. She wants to surround herself with beautiful things. She wants to help Caleb. She wants to be her again. She wants.
And it's okay for Nott the Brave to want things, because Nott the Brave exists outside of social contracts. She's already a monster--there's no need to pretend to fit in. It's freeing, to be able to want things as much as you want and people won't bat an eye. As much as she hated that body, she loved the freedom it gave her. The freedom to be transgressive in a way she was unable to be as Veth Brenatto. Because, much as she loves her family, isn't being a woman and mother something of a cage to her? Those labels put her in specific boxes, they determine how she should behave. So much of later development hinges on these questions: "What does it mean to be a good woman in this society? What does it mean to be a good mother?" She is SO hard on herself for not being with Luc enough, which is absolutely understandable, but she also wants this life of adventure. Does that make her a bad person? A bad mother? To want something that isn't her family?
And then Caleb. Probably the most unfortunate thing she wants, something she knows she can never have. Because she has Yeza and she loves him and he's her husband. They have a social contract that she must abide by. But Caleb's right there and she wants him. Does that make her a bad woman? Does that make her a bad wife? It's just one more thing that makes her different from her peers, her inability to be content with what she already has. And, at the end of the day, I think this is what we should think of when we talk about Veth's relationship with motherhood and womanhood. How transgressive it is for her to so deeply desire when clearly, from the way she grew up and the messages she internalized, it wasn't a woman's place to want more than she was afforded, nor was it a mother's.
