Merida was staggered. She kept trying to fit this information against what she knew of her mother, and it kept bouncing off like an arrow that had lost its tip. Her mother, her perfect, queenly mother, had learned her love of reading and language and education not in a court in France but here. When she had spent all that time chiding Merida to do better and be more womanly, she was comparing her not to princesses and women in places like Ardbarrach, but to the hardworking and varied girls and women here. When she’d said she wanted the best future for Merida and tried to marry her off to have a family of her own, she was coming from a place that started with broken families with no gentle places to land.
There is a reason to a parent nagging