Essay - a Gift for My Mother
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 hardworking and loveable husband and father. He comes home every day and greets his daughter by saying “Hello, my precious” (pg. 8). This greeting does not please the mother and gives her blood frenzy, which also makes her respond, saying, she does not know why their daughter does not think her name is “my precious” (pg. 8) after all this time.
The narrator is the daughter of the parents described above. The year the story takes place, the narrator turned ten years old. The daughter a good student in her school, she does her homework and is an excellent speller, and as described in the text her only difficulty is the math homework - in which her father comes home after work to help her with. She likes it when her father helps her, and in fact she believes her father is a better teacher than her math teacher Mrs. Emmerson, which statement she gives the grounds for her father not making her feel nervous or stupid: “He’s very good at explaining things and never makes you feel nervous or stupid […] He’s a far better teacher than Mrs. Emmerson” (pg. 8).
The story takes place in South Africa, which the narrator lets the reader know by telling that bushveld, which is well-grassed plains in South Africa, grows behind their house and leaves of
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 hardworking and loveable husband and father. He comes home every day and greets his daughter by saying “Hello, my precious” (pg. 8). This greeting does not please the mother and gives her blood frenzy, which also makes her respond, saying, she does not know why their daughter does not think her name is “my precious” (pg. 8) after all this time.
The narrator is the daughter of the parents described above. The year the story takes place, the narrator turned ten years old. The daughter a good student in her school, she does her homework and is an excellent speller, and as described in the text her only difficulty is the math homework - in which her father comes home after work to help her with. She likes it when her father helps her, and in fact she believes her father is a better teacher than her math teacher Mrs. Emmerson, which statement she gives the grounds for her father not making her feel nervous or stupid: “He’s very good at explaining things and never makes you feel nervous or stupid […] He’s a far better teacher than Mrs. Emmerson” (pg. 8).
The story takes place in South Africa, which the narrator lets the reader know by telling that bushveld, which is well-grassed plains in South Africa, grows behind their house and leaves of