The story revolves around her daughter Emily, who is nineteen. The reader, is led through Emily’s life by her mother recalling the episodes that she remembered of her daughter growing up. These episodes mainly tell how Emily’s mother had to leave her alone for long periods of time with strangers and with relatives so that she could work and earn money to pay for their existence. Emily’s father left when she was a baby, the mother notes how “He could no longer endure” (Charters 718) the poverty they were living in. She would have to leave Emily with strangers, family and even in a convalesces when the little girl became ill. For nearly the first six years of her life, she was apart from her daughter for long periods of time and the reader …show more content…
This notion of Emily being independent and strong on her own is one that the reader is made aware of several times in the story. The display of this attitude by the mother, shows the mother trying to rationalize her semi-abandonment of the child as she was growing up; however, readers are shown that because of the lack of social services and the situation the mother was put in, she really had no other choice than to be separated from her child for long periods of time. The mother understood that she needed to work and feed her child and therefore, had to sacrifice precious moments with Emily. At a certain point when Emily could stay with her mother and live a relatively normal home-life, she had already become stoic and serious. Emily didn’t smile much and was depicted as cold, but she had a talent to make people laugh. At the end of the story Emily realizes the hardships her mother had to endure while trying to give her a life and a future, and this is reflected when she tells her mother “Aren’t you ever going to finish the ironing, Mother? (In Charters, 2015, pp.723). It is here that the reader gains insight through the above quote that the mother has never really come to terms with the fact that she didn’t give the nurturing love and attention that a