The following essay, The Long Good-Bye: Mother’s Day in Federal Prison, written by Amanda Coyne discusses the direct and aggregated discomposure of the separation between an incarcerated mother and her child on Mother’s Day. Amanda Coyne covers a substantial amount of detail, creating a visual image of the surroundings and emotions within the prison camp on Mother’s Day; from the nature of the food presented in the vending machines to the impression, mothers leave their children. Coyne’s paper is well written and expresses emotions of a mother and her child before, as Coyne claimed, their last goodbye.
The setting for the profiling essay takes place in a Federal Prison Camp for women in Pekin, Illinois. Amanda Coyne brings her nephew to the…show more content… Coyne chooses Mother's Day to express the emotion women have with their children and how they care for them, despite having committed a crime. In fact, instead of telling their children what they want to tell them they try to say common maternal phrases. At first glance, what could be hard to interpret what Coyne is trying to write when she states, “They say things like, ‘Do well in school,’ ‘Be nice to your sister,’ ‘Be good for Aunt Berry, or grandma.’ They don’t say, ‘I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry. I love you more than anything else in the world and think about you every minute, and I worry about you with a pain that shoots straight to my heart, a pain so great I think I will just burst when I think of you alone without me, I’m sorry’” (Coyne 78). What I have drawn from this claim is Coyne tries to differentiate how mothers refrain from stating the obvious to avert questions their children may ask such as, “Why are you in prison?” or “What did you do wrong to be here?” This way instead of envisioning their mothers as the criminals they would see them as a motherly
