Sunday, March 29, 2009
Satellite
This story was slightly sad to me, maybe just because I think mother-daughter relations so often seem so fraught with disappointment and misunderstandings. It's interesting to see how the dynamics have changed in Ms. Hempel's childhood home, since the strong presence of her father is gone and her young sister and mother are by themselves. Ms. Hempel seems sort of detached from the whole situation, like a satellite, I guess: still connected to the place but kept at a distance. Any thoughts on this story?
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2 comments:
Yeah, it was a little sad. The family is fragmented, and the remaining fragments fit together so awkwardly. It's sort of strange and touching how the mother clings to the youngest, the late-life surprise. And I think it must feel odd to be an adult child and to see your mother raising a sibling who's so young that she doesn't even seem like a sibling. You get to observe your mother's parenting practices from a completely different plane.
I really liked the scene of chopping out the shrubbery. It seemed so urgent.
Nice take, Erin, on what the title means. I hadn't thought of that.
Yeah, I thought of my own siblings, of course, even though we were even further apart in age. But I think it must have been very weird for them to see my mom interact with me as a kid, especially since it was in such a different circumstance than they were raised in. During a discussion Tracie once said to me, "But you don't know what Mom was like back then." And it struck me because it had never occurred to me that my mom would have ever been different than she was.
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