My Mother Life

The poem “Mother Who Gave Me Life”, written by Gwen Harwood explores the extremely personal relationship between a daughter and her mother. It focus’ on the universal role of women as mothers and nurturers throughout time. It explores the intimate moments and memories between a daughter and her mother, and gives us as the reader an insight into the relationship between the two.

Opportunities for an individual to develop understanding of themselves stem from the experiences attained on their journey through life. The elements which contribute to life are explored throughout Gwen Harwood’s poems, At Mornington and Mother Who Gave Me Life, where the recollection of various events are presented as influences on the individual’s perception of the continuity of life. Both poems examine the connections between people and death in relation to personal connections with the persona’s father or mother. By encompassing aspects of human nature and life’s journey, Harwood addresses memories and relationships which contribute to one’s awareness of life.

After gorging on the offerings of Thanksgiving, while still seated at the table, we realized it was time for us to fulfill a family tradition born out of an early-90s phase of my mother’s with a fascination for all things new-age. Each of us awkwardly crammed all we were thankful for into a thirty-second impromptu monolog. When the warmth of the spotlight focused on me, I let the estrogen flow, disregarded the patience of the less emotionally in-touch family so obviously seated in frustration, and offered a long-winded exposé on how each of my relatives before me contributed to all that I am thankful for. It was with the conclusion of my verbose explanation on all my mother does for me, that she took this occasion to voice how, with every mother she has the chance of meeting, she tells the story of, but for her, I might not be alive today.

Sonja Livingston is a talented and unique young writer who uses an unusual structure in her work. Structure is the form that an author’s writing takes; how the sentences are formed and how they are placed together to create the work. In Ghostbread, her award-winning novel, Ms. Livingstone uses a freeform chapter structure that, while roughly in chronological order, is not necessarily linear. In chapter 3, Ms. Livingston speaks of her father, “I had no father” (6), and then in chapter 4 she speaks of a childhood friend, “My favorite person should have been Carol Johnson.” (7) Through the course of the book, Ms. Livingston chronicles her life from birth to age 18, but it is not a strict telling; she meanders and explores events as they are remembered, not bound by a rigid timeline. The structure of her work is unconventional and through that unconventional structure she gives the reader an experience that is more like poetry than a conventional novel. Towards the end of Ghostbread, Ms. Livingston contemplates the effect that her miscarriage and the revelation of her sexual activity will have on her relationship with her mother with this passage, “Sex. Pregnancy. Men. What were they to her? Failure? Freedom? Power? Paths she followed, but did not prescribe. At least not aloud.” (212). The use of partial sentences and imagery are elements commonly associated with poetry and it gives

Bessie and James moved around a lot, because he was a school teacher. The two lived in Camden South Carolina for a few short months. Here the young couple learned Bessie was pregnant and both were very happy, but Bessie wanted to be closer to her parents. Mary her mother would be such a help after the birth of the baby. James got his teaching job

Prior to World War II, Robert and Bessie’s close relatives literally meant family that lived nearby, most of whom were kin to Bessie. The only relatives of Robert’s that resided in or near Bradley was his brother and business partner, Harry and his wife, Flossie. In addition to Bessie’s parents, Merritt and Mary Kirby, other members of her close extended family were Bessie’s sister and brother-in-law, Pearl and John Madden, her brother and sister-in-law, Emmett and Nellie Kirby, and numerous nephews and nieces. Particularly significant among these relatives was their niece,

In her essay “Nine Days of Ruth,” Angela Morales eloquently yet humorously narrates the final nine days of her grandmother’s life. Initially, Morales reminisces about the day her grandmother Ruth passed away projecting a gothic, murky and vacant atmosphere. However, Morales shifts from a leaden tone to a more gratifying voice revealing her grandmother’s life trajectory: betrayal, death, and struggles. The author ends with a eulogy expressing to her grandmother that while other will bury with a different image or perspective in mind, she will bury her as a luminary. Make-believe, fantasy, and imagination play an important role in the essay because it conveys the beauty of death.

In the novel “Out Of The Dust”, the main character Billie Jo viewed her mother in a very positive way, before her mother’s tragic death. She loved the way her mother played piano, and thought she was very talented, this inspired her to be like her mother, and to get as talented in playing piano as her mother. She loved her mother because her mother loved her deeply and showed it. Ma was so close to Billy Jo, and loving, and sweet to her, so billy Jo thought of her as the most kind, gentle, loving, and caring person as she always was. Billy Jo respected her mother, and loved her for being a positive role model for her to follow.

"You think because I am her mother I have a key, or that in some way you could use me as a key? She has lived for nineteen years. Over and over, we are told of the limitations on choice--"it was the only way"; "They persuaded me" and verbs of necessity recur for descriptions of both the mother's and Emily's behavior. " In such statements as "my wisdom ! came too late," the story verges on becoming an analysis of parental guilt. With the narrator, we construct an image of the mother's own development: her difficulties as a young mother alone with her daughter and barely surviving during the early years of the depression; her painful months of enforced separation from her daughter; her gradual and partial relaxation in response to a new husband and a new family as more children follow; her increasingly complex anxieties about her first child; and finally her sense of family balance which surrounds but does not quite include the early memories of herself and Emily in the grips of survival needs. In doing so she has neither trivialized nor romanticized the experience of motherhood; she has indicated the wealth of experience yet to be explored in the story’s possibilities of experiences, like motherhood, which have rarely been granted serious literary consideration. Rather she is searching for

Major events in a person’s life have a long lasting impact on them and help them to become the person they are today. These events help provide them with inspiration for their art. Artists and poets alike use their own lives as inspiration for their works. Sharon Olds is no exception to this statement. Sharon Olds is one of the nation’s finest contemporary poets, and in order to see why Sharon Olds’s poetry is so profound, it is necessary to understand the events that shaped Sharon Olds as a person herself. These events are all featured in the majority of her writings. Sharon Olds’s strong Calvinist upbringing, her divorce, and her alcoholic father are all mirrored in her poetry.

In Nineteen Thirty Seven, the women draw strength from their mothers through tragedy. Josephine, whose mother is in prison, is visited by a woman she has been to the massacre river with. Josephine asks her “Who are you?” to which she responds with, “I am the flame and the spark by which my mother lived.”(pg.39) This statement portrays the ability of the women to persevere through hardship by looking to their mothers, whether they are dead or alive.

“Katherine O’Flaherty was born in St. Lois, Missouri, to a Creole-Irish family that enjoyed a high place in society. Her father died when she was four, and Kate was raised by her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. Very well read at young age, she received her formal education at the St. Louis Academy of the Sacred Heart. In 1870, she married Oscar Chopin, a Louisiana businessman, and lived with him in Natchitoches parish and New Orleans, where she became a close observer of Creole and Cajun life. Following her husband’s sudden death in 1884 she returned to St. Louis, where she raised her six children and began her literary career. In slightly more than a decade she produced a substantial body work, including the story collection Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897) and the classic novella The Awakening (1899), which was greeted with a storm of criticism for its frank treatment of female sexuality” (Mays 439).

Growing up in a home with both my parents, I was fortunate to be able to spend a lot of quality time with my father. We used to go out together and play soccer, baseball, and ride bikes. I remember we used to play a lot of old school video games and my mother would get pretty upset at the hours we spent playing and not doing anything productive. In my point of view, our relationship was perfect; our bond was strong like any father and son. I was only four years old when my world was turned upside down. My life changed the day that my mom and my dad separated, I felt alone. The process of a divorce was too much for a child that age to handle; it was a hard time for me. Although I had no father figure for about 12 years because my dad moved

The mother-daughter relationship is often scrutinized, publicized, and capitalized on. Whether from tell-all biographies, to humorous sit-coms, or private therapy sessions, this particular relationship dynamic gives some of the most emotion-activating memories. When female authors reflect and write about their relationships with their mothers, they have a tendency to taint their reflections with the opinions they have as an adult, reviewing the actions of their mother when they were young. These opinions set the tone of the story independently and in conjunction with the relationship itself and manifest in creative literary styles that weave an even more intricate story. Case in point, when reviewing the two literary works “I Stand Here

In the essay “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens” African- American author Alice Walker talked about her mother’s real-life stories, which came from her mother’s lips as naturally as breathing. Her mother's gift for storytelling had a positive influence on Walker's development as becoming a writer. Also, Alice Walker was greatly influenced by Zora Neale Hurston who was an African- American novelist. Her grandmother and mother suppressed their emotions and natural human instinct because they were black women. Alice Walker described about the story of African- American women’s suppressed life.