Love, Your Only Mother By David Michael Kaplan

Imagine your mother leaving you at a young age and never coming back. It would hurt, right? Now, imagine how confused you would be if you received a postcard from your mother, the one who abandoned you. At first there is just the one postcard, but then there were two, then three, and they just kept coming. The postcards always seem to find you; you move, they move. Your mother has always known where you were living; yet you do not know if you can trust the address on her postcards. The short story Love, Your Only Mother by David Michael Kaplan tells of this belittling experience in a way that is truly heartbreaking. When the narrator recalls the chain of events it is surreal the amount of emotion that is portrayed in such a short amount of time. When the narrator is telling how it all happened, how she left and her father wouldn’t divorce her mother, I got the feeling that maybe her father is “mailing” the letters to her, to try and makeup in some way for what her mother has done to her. Her father’s actions speak loudly about himself; he says he wont divorce his wife because she might come back. I think he truly loved
Or why her mother continues to put salt in the wound and send her postcards. The narrator does wander where her mother went and where she is now. She even plays a game where she imagine her mother is hiding somewhere on the postcards she has sent. Her mother has addressed the postcards wrong. For example she might put the wrong date or say she is in a town that does not exist. Why would she do that? Maybe it was to never really let her daughter get close to her. Maybe it was for selfish reasons such as “I can know where you are, but you can not know anything about where I am at or what I am doing”. As we can imagine this would cause a great deal of pain and