Lawn's by Mona Simpson

The short story " Lawn's" by Mona Simpson is very interesting to me because it was more than a tough girl who steals and lies and who is totally careless. It is about a mother who put her job before her husband and kids and about a father who stole his daughter's childhood and between them both Jenny " the tough girl" dying for attention or someone to rescue her shall we say from her destiny. The main point in the whole story is the selfishness of the human being.

Often in marriage problems or if one parent chooses his job as his first priority, the children suffer a lot from the lack of attention and care which causes them at times to be "trouble makers" but it is their only way to draw their parent's attention to them. Jenny says: " You're out of the store, you've done this thing you're not supposed to do, but no one stops you. At first it's a rush. Like you're even for everything you didn't get before. But then you're left alone, no one even notices you. Nothing changes"(Simpson 445). It is the need for attention and the hope for a change of the bad situation that drove Jenny to steal.

For a father to molest his daughter at a very young age and then rape her at the age of twelve " He waited till I was twelve to really do it" (Simpson 456) that is just awful, disgusting, and really sad. He's the one who is supposed to protect her from strangers, raise her with good principles and values and over all help her become a positive person and be there for her whenever she needs him in a good way and a positive way, and not destroy his own daughter's life. For me that is the peak of selfishness. Jenny went directly to adulthood, because children should never have to deal with what she had to deal with.I think Jenny needed her mom to be there for her, and frankly I think if her mom was always there, her dad would never be able to harm her. If only she gave her daughter some time to just talk then probably Jenny might have trusted her and told her what was going on but instead she was always preoccupied with her job and thinking that she has the perfect family and that nothing could ever go wrong for her. Just like Jenny said: "How could he do this to me, she kept yelping. To her. Everything was to her." (Simpson 461) Parents are supposed to be the people who think about you the most, who leave themselves without and put you first, who know that you'll always look up to them and therefore try to be good and do the right thing so you do the same.

When Jenny went to College and met Glenn and started going out with him, she told him about her problem but instead of him sticking to her side and helping her, he left her which just made him another selfish person in her list. He did not think that she was hurting and that he should help her, and the amount of trust that she put in him to be able to tell him something that she has been hiding all her life, instead he just thought about himself and left her.

In conclusion, Jenny is a victim of the selfishness of human beings. Everyone thought about himself and disregarded her feelings. Unfortunately her parents destroyed her life and honestly they do not deserve to be parents.