Grace Paley's Short Story Mother

Essay for Mother “Oh, I Long to See My Mother in the Doorway” (Paley 82). The short story Mother written by the American writer Grace Paley starts with these lyrics. In this story, the author depicts a daughter recollected her mother and missed her very much after her death. After reading this story, I found an interesting fact about the relationship between parents and their children. In my opinion, the children often misunderstand their parents while their parents keep worrying about them. However, when the children get older, they always regret what they thought about their parents when they were young. Firstly, parents and children always have different politics and have quarrels so children misunderstand their parents. As

In the text, the daughter not only regret what she did on her mother but also miss mother very much after the sudden death of her mother. According to the passage, the daughter had a quarrel with her mother about eating lunch. No longer after the quarrel, her mother died. I found these sentences: “At the door of the kitchen she said……What will become of you? Then she died.” (Paley 82) In these sentences, there is not any other sentence between the mother’s words and the death of mother. It is very sudden because these two things are not related directly. It shows that the writer (the daughter) was shocked to hear the death of mother. She even did not make it up with her mother after the argument. Unfortunately, she has no chance to do that now. Also, the cause of the argument was that the daughter did not finish lunch all the time, the mother cared about the daughter, and hoped her daughter could have lunch regularly. In other words, the daughter argued with her mother because her mother’s good advice. So the daughter repented of arguing with mother and misunderstanding her. At the same time, she missed her mother and really wanted to see her mother again: “ Naturally for the rest of my life I longed to see her, not only in doorways, in a great number of places.” (Paley 82) When people miss someone, they will feel like the people stay with them all the time no matter what they are doing. The