You cannot escape the fact that women mould your first five years, whether you like it or not. And I can’t say I do like it very much.

Lessing’s remark points to a social fact she sees as inescapable: in most cultures, women (mothers, nurses, female relatives) do the bulk of early childcare, and thus shape a child’s earliest habits, language, and emotional expectations. The sting comes in the second sentence—her admission that she doesn’t “like it very much”—which can be read as a provocation against sentimental idealization of motherhood and “female influence.” It suggests ambivalence about how gendered caregiving roles constrain both sexes: women are burdened with formative responsibility, while boys/men may later resent dependence on, or identification with, the feminine in their own origins.