Practicing Feedback

People of Our Own

by Yuko Sinnott

    "Don't rest your elbows on the table!" "Sit properly!" Throughout dinner, my mother used to police my behavior like a snake, gazing at a helpless frog. Naturally, I wasn't enjoying it as a child. However, if it weren't for her or any of my family, pointing out my bad manners, no one would have mentioned or even cared how I would grow up to be. It is family that expresses bottomless care for its members' well being.

    In the fiction, "Girl" (13), Jamaica Kincaid illustrates a typical mother that anticipates the best outcome for her teen daughter. The mother gives the daughter endless advice: from how to garden to how to be loved by a man. Despite the mother's passion to educate her daughter, the daughter appears to be too naive to comprehend the mother's point. Her naiveness is implied when she asks the mother "but what if the baker won't let me feel the bread?" (14) when the mother is through her guidance on how to be socially well received.

    Another example is "Flight" (Lessing 18). The story identifies the grandfather's struggle to let go of the granddaughter for her marriage. Lessing's description of the grandfather presents a fatherly figure who wants to keep his little girl at home forever, just like his birds in their cages. However, the grandfather leaves his ego behind for his granddaughter's happiness when he says to his favorite bird, "Now you can go" (20) and sets it free. It clearly expresses the grandfather's solitude and a breakup with the past to move forward.

    James Wright also conveys a mother's endless care for her deaf child in the poem "Mutterings over the Crib of a Deaf Child" (73). In the lines "how will he hear/how will he know" (lines 1 and 11), the mother already anticipates the future when her baby reaches his school age. She knows the hardships the son is destined to face. Yet, she is determined not to be swallowed by the inevitable outcome but to treat her son just like any other normal children.