When Dee finds out that the quilts were already given to her sister, Dee gets furious and believes that she deserves the quilts more than Maggie and that Maggie would not take care of them as well as she would. Poor Maggie says to her mother "She can have them Mama...I can 'member Grandma Dee without the quilts". Maggie is used to never getting anything. Throughout the entire story, it says that Maggie gives up many things so Dee can have what she needs or wants. Dee is quite ungrateful.
She does not feel comfortable taking on the old fashioned lifestyle her mother and sister do. Dee is a more contemporary version of society striving to leave their home and become successful. Dee inadvertently talked down to her mother and sister, reading to them on several occasion as if they were ignorant (121). Dee appeared to be very intimidating
They wake her up early and help her stretch her legs in hope that they will one day be straight/normal. They showed the compassion that her birth mother would never give to her child. Linda later recalls, “I must have been held so much that the sensation became a part of me”(65). Fifty years later when Linda and her mother Nancy finally meet for dinner, they don’t hug or even shake hands. The mother may be the birth mother and be related by blood but she sure doesn’t show any love toward her handicapped daughter that she abandoned.
From the beginning when we were first introduced to Dee, we find that she has changed her name to Wangero saying that Dee is “dead” because she didn’t think her name, Dicie, had any cultural significance and so she choice a name she felt suited her more. She says she couldn’t bear being named after people who oppress her. She has no connection or respect with her family. This is sad because she doesn’t like who she once was. Although she has learned a lot from her schooling and has a better knowledge than her mom & sister, I feel she possesses this know-it-all attitude about what heritage really is.
It is other factors such as age and location that contribute to the relationship and determine the level of closeness. Emily’s lack of emotion towards her mother can be attributed to a number of issues in her youth. Since Emily was born, her mother had been working diligently to support the family. To make matters worse, she was only nineteen when Emily was born. Her husband left early on in Emily’s life and her mother was forced to leave her with friends or send her to day care.
Jenna’s mother and her get into arguments over Jenna asking her mother to watch her son. Jenna has to pay for daycare after school for him while she is at work and has little money to pay for additional daycare when she would be at college classes. Her mother says that she has raised her children and does not believe that she should have to help her daughter because she received no help with her children. Jenna has a 17 year old sister who does help with watching her son, but Jenna also feels guilty always having to ask her and has no money to pay her to watch her son. Jenna and her sister are close, her sister plans on attending college at the end of her senior year and wants to study to become a doctor.
Shakhboz Negmatov Prof: Chadwick Essay #-1 English. 12 Mon-Wed. 12:40-2:50 PM “My Secret Left Me Unable to Help” by Joyce Maynard is an essay about the author herself as a mother who trying help her daughter Audrey through some tough time in her life. Audrey traveled away for volunteering work in the Dominican Republic where she found someone She loves. His name is Johnny. All of suddenly, Audrey stop making regularly contact with her mother.
Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” is a short story about heritage. A thriller in which heritage is seen in different ways. In “Everyday Use”, Walker tells a story about the conflict between a daughter and her family. Even though, the character of Mama is poorly educated, she still knows the meaning of love of her heritage. She wishes to teach this to her two daughters but times have changed and her daughters have difference views of what they think heritage is.
The tone that she uses in her piece seems to be sarcasm and this sarcasm is what leads me to the assumptions I make and the way I read her essay. She obviously wants to go to school and become economically independent and be able to support herself. I think that she is not happy with her current situation of being a mom and a wife and feels unappreciated. She stays home and does all the things she lists for her husband, but she resents this role in society that she is in. I assume that she wants a divorce from her husband but because of the role that society has placed on her, but she is unable to get one because she is very dependent on him.
While many single mothers worry too much or regret decisions during their children childhood they are satisfied with the result and the out come of there children by the actions their children make after they grown out of their childhood In “I stand here ironing” a mother depicts her first child to have a bad early childhood by making the wrong decision not by choice but simply what got handed to them in a urban world. “She was a miracle to me but when she was eight months old I had to leave her daytimes with the woman downstairs to whom she was no miracle at all, for I worked or looked for work and for Emily’s father who “could no longer endure sharing want with us.”” Narrator did not want leave her child with the downstairs neighbor, but to provide the little she could to her child she made scarifies due to been a one parent family. She did all she could even with the father figure leaving to irrelevant discussion on his part. When she sees the development of her child thru the years she gets warmth never felt. “Now suddenly she was Somebody, and as imprisoned in her difference as she had in anonymity.” In the narrators point of view her child was an outcast, a nobody, but when she got the call from her daughter it seem the sun finally started to shine in her daughter path, she was free.