Essay - a Gift for My Mother

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A Gift for My Mother
The story “A Gift for My Mother” is a short story written by Viv McDade which deals with a family of three; a set of parents and their daughter. The mother envies the beautiful houses with hallways and moulded skirting boards on the other side of the railway, and she usually gets angry about the differences between her own family and their property compared to the house on other side of the railway. The mother is a housewife, and the narrator lets the reader get to know this on page 8, where the father comes home with his paycheck and the mother responds “What you’ve earned isn’t enough for us to live on” (pg. 8). - Clearly the father’s paycheck is what pays for the family. The father on the other hand is a …show more content…
The daughter even puts on a fancy blouse and waits at the bus stop where the mother arrives. When the mother arrives and finds out what the daughter did, the daughter is shut down immediately, because the mother states “People will think I sent you, they’ll think I dressed you up and sent you out to sell flowers from the bush” (pg. 11) and the fact that people would think less of the mother and think of the mother even more financially unstable is a scare to the mother. The mother does not for one second think the daughter did this to please the mother and make the mother stop grumble about the father’s paycheck.
The theme in this short story is a proverb saying “Jealousy is a stupid thing” - because in this situation the mother lets the envy take over her mind. She is jealous of the houses on the other side of the railway and she hates the fact that she is not one of the richest, and that makes her a bit angry. Her angriness is put on the father. The daughter, in the meantime, is trying to smooth everything out by doing a nice thing for the mother. The mother, however, cannot see further than the tip of her nose, and is more concern about being judged as a poor family. And when one of the neighbors does not want the money back, because she thinks the whole thing is silly, she tells the main character to get her mother and they can talk about it. The main character lets the mother know,
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