Summary Of When Your Mother Is A Stranger 'By Heather O' Neill

The Mother is a poem about abortion by Gwendolyn Brooks. This poem is an emotional and personal topic about abortion. Abortion is a topic not many people feel comfortable discussing about, since it is a sensitive subject that people make it out to be. Gwendolyn Brooks allows you to understand the perspective of a mother who is choosing to abort one’s child and her feelings after doing so. Although many might consider abortion a cruel decision a mother can make, one never knows the circumstances a mother may be in, that she chose abortion as an option. Analyzing this poem can help women cope if they experienced an abortion, help with the options of many women experiencing a pregnancy, and encourage young girls to always protect themselves if they choose to be sexually active. Ultimately, this poem’s message can help reduce and impact current societal ills, such as, suicide rates, depression, high school dropouts, and teenage pregnancy.

Joann Murray’s essay on “Someone’s Mother,” describes a time when she was driving down the highway in Albany, coming from a dentist appointment when she spotted a hitchhiker. Now this is nothing unusual for hitchhikers to be on this highway but it was something about this one that captured Joan’s attention. She was half way down the road but her intuition made her make a U-turn and go back. Another reason she turned around is because the lady would not stop waving until she stopped. This hitchhiker was different from most hitchhikers, she had on a raincoat and a black hat and her hair was white. As Joan approached her, she could tell that she was an old lady. She was under the impression the old lady’s vehicle had broken down but there was no vehicle in sight. The lady informed Joan that she just needed a ride to “Nassau, which was three miles away. While riding down the road she found out the lady was ninety two years old and was apparently was “out for a walk.” The old lady begged Joan to drop her off at a drugstore in town instead of at her residence. This made Joan reminisce about the time when her ninety year old mother called her brother and said she did not remember how to get dressed anymore. Shortly after that, Joan had to put her mother in a nursing home. Joan began to realize the lady had been lost before, especially after seeing a white dove pinned to her collar. The older lady expressed dropping her off at

77), her “restless mental vigor” (p. 78), and her willingness to stand up for her opinions, no matter how unpopular. Though the mother in this essay uses extraordinary words and is obviously a well-educated woman, the diction used by the speaker is generally straightforward to the average person; therefore, it can be concluded that the story was written for the average person. The terms used are nonetheless very specific and suited to their purpose of describing the mother, especially with several precise adjectives appearing constantly. The mother has an “emotional voice” (p. 78), holds “unpopular, even fantastic, positions” (p. 78), and gives a “vibrantly innocent look” (p. 77) after destroying a game of bridge. However, the essay does require thinking, as several of the examples of the mother’s behavior and phrases that she employs are very clever and include a much more sophisticated diction, as is true in the mother’s life. When she responds to the question “’Save stamps?’” (p. 75) with “’No…I build model airplanes’” (p. 75). Even the speaker could not understand what her meant for years, which was that building model airplanes was her hobby, not collecting stamps. The tone and diction that the speaker uses is simple, but the reader has to work harder to understand examples of things the speaker’s mother does or says.

It is divided up into small paragraphs, which include a variety of different thoughts and experiences. The way she tells her story has a very interesting tone. Instead of someone who is joyful and excited to talk about their life, the author shows a more angry and stern tone. The author begins with a very odd beginning ot her essay, she talks about how difficult it is to try to kill her childhood using an autobiography. In the end, the opposite happened.

From the beginning, Oates paints an image of the mother that isn’t very pretty. She is shown to be condescending, hypocritical, and downright rude. Connie recalls her mother’s tendency to compare her to her older sister. Connie’s sister June, was by no means the definition of perfect. She still lives at home at the age of twenty-four and did mediocre work as a secretary. Even so, her mother deemed her to be someone Connie should strive to be like. Willing her youngest daughter to follow in the older one’s footsteps illustrated just how low the mother’s expectations for the both were. She didn’t dream of a better, more successful life for her daughters. Along with being compared to her sister, Connie was also bashed by her mother for her appearance. Demands to “stop gawking at yourself,” and “you think you’re so pretty?” (Oates 1033), contributed to her self-image issues. Often times, Connie felt that she would rather die than listen to her mother’s criticisms. By revealing this, Oates emphasizes just how detrimental a mother’s support is to a teenager. Receiving no positive assurance from her mother, Connie turned to others for validation. Her mother’s disproval of her was the main reason she felt the need to sneak out and meet boys. She changed her appearance and behavior when she went out, hoping to become a different person completely. Hanging out with the wrong crowd led her to run into Arnold, an older man who

This story was published in nineteen fourteen, a year not exactly known to be pro-feminism. Women were still thought of as inferior during this time period, which explains the town’s reaction in the story. Mother’s epiphany is an example of progression towards more forward thinking. Mother symbolizes all of the women feeling oppressed who take action to change that. Mother knows that she deserves more and will not back down from the opportunity to get what she deserves just because she is a woman.

It shares the mistakes a mother feels she has made, and the regretful conscious of a mother. This story asserts a sense of uneasiness for a new mother, and a sense of familiarity for mother who have experienced motherhood once before. By Tillie Olsen sharing her story in first person it aloud the reader to be able to feel and really understand the guilt of being a new mother. Which brought the readers into Tillie Olsen world.

“Where’d You Bernadette?” by Maria Semple is a novel about an eerie woman who has a daughter and a husband. She seems to be a mysterious individual at the beginning, but as the story goes through, you find out why she is acting that way. She ends up by escaping away and leaving her family; nonetheless, at the end everything gets together again. Maria Semple loves to compare family’s issues because in the entire book is writing about how the characters interact between them. Although, Semple seems to be a sophisticated author, the role of mother in WDYB is the biggest topic to analyze in the full story. In this novel, there are several mothers who can be genuinely valuable examples of the types of motherhoods.

“Love you, mama, Miss you”(Aviv, 2), the words of three year old Adam to his mother who was placed with the Orange County Social Services. In Rachel Aviv’s article “ Where is your mother” thirty-nine year old, single working parent Niveen Ismail, “begged” them to return her son after she left Adam unsupervised at home whilst she was out. Niveen mentions that on this tragic day that, “It was mechanical-I wasn’t thinking anymore...I was just trying to survive” (Aviv, 6). She was overworked, undernourished and had just reached a “breaking point”. Months have gone by, the Egyptian mother complied to her case plan trying to learn to “Parent American style”, attending parenting classes in high hopes of Adam being returned to her. Despite her attempts, Adam was placed with a foster family, who was willing to adopt him if her parental rights were terminated. A mother who once abandoned her child, is a bad mother.

Heathfield’s use of the multiple narrators is a strong and unique tool used to strengthen the meaning behind the text and the development of the theme of abuse. For example, in the novel the mystery narrator reveals the true horrors that Pearl is ignorant of, although later Pearl describes her feelings as “a

Relationships are the most important part of everyone’s life and most of them start from the very beginning. Many people assume that our first relationship, especially with our mothers are very important. As opposed to, our mothers play a meaningful role of being the primary nurturer and teacher. This is a unique situation, since when a mother gives birth to a daughter she becomes her nurturer and a role model because of that child start to mimic their mother, which may lead to a complex relationship. The characters from Tillie Olsen’s essay demonstrates this kind of a sophisticated relationship. However, their situation is happen to be so because the narrator is a teen mother left alone with a newborn baby at the Great Depression time without

The zeal with which she throws herself into her household tasks is entirely self-imposed, but borne of the expectation that the next oldest female in the house should be a caretaker when the oldest is incapacitated. We watch her zeal turn into resentment and detachment as she grows from age eleven to thirteen, which adds the complicated layer of a teenage girl’s relationship to her mother to the

The narrators in this story are omniscient and informed. The tone is mostly direct, piercing and expectant. The story has a sense of traditional style tone. Some people think the O?Connors writings are grotesque. But O?Connor states that she is just being realistic.

This is by far her most important technique as she uses narration, description and repetition to overwhelm the reader and help them really feel what McBride’s character did. The reason she wants the readers to truly understand the emotional battle the women she describes went through is because her goal is to reveal the reasons behind their low self esteem in the early 1900’s. Those reasons are shown to have been largely a result of their work being demeaned as unimportant compared to the man’s.

When I was at the age of three my mother was a very beautiful woman with the vicarious thrill of being a mother of two. My father who worked efficiently at his job of employment but yet was rarely at home to savor the joy of seeing his son’s very first steps. Living as a mother she often grew dreary of his actions; the feeling of depression and loneliness slowly crept upon her. On my fourth birthday my father of course worked once more, so my mother felt banal and brought him a piece of cake at work. As she walked through the doors she realized that another woman was perched upon my father's lap, and with this she grew furious. The red dress she wore complemented her face as it began to alter its color into a darker shade a red. The more she pondered on the thought of the hurt and pain she felt at that moment the more she realized what she needed to do not knowing that it would affect the life of her kids dramatically.