Short Story Analysis of Your Only Mother by David Kaplan
In the short story Love, Your Only Mother, by David Michael Kaplan, there is an evident theme of the importance of love between and a child and a parent. This story is representing the necessary relationship between a daughter and her mother, no matter what individual problems they each have encountered throughout their lives. Since the daughter is talking directly to her mother, she is telling her exact emotions and how she has felt throughout her life.
The daughter has contradictory emotions throughout the story. “The postcard was Nebraska, and there’s no Ferndale in Nebraska. In the card before that, you said you were making me a birthday cake that you’d send. Even though I vowed I’d never do it again, I try to understand what you are telling me (p 314).” This illustrates that she is angry with her mother for lying to her all the time in the postcards. She doesn’t understand why her mother is telling her things in the postcards, that later she discovers are not true. It seems that she wants to give up but she can’t because of the love for her mother. “Sometimes I decided you were dead, even wished you were dead, but then another postcard would come, with another message to ponder (p 314).” The daughter can not just throw out the postcard without reading it, because no matter what, she is going to be interested in what her mother has to tell her, and she always has a deep inside feeling that maybe her mother will come back. A relationship between a child and a parent will always exist. There is a fight for love among some people because throughout their lives they have struggled to maintain that relationship. Even if a parent has left the child when they were young, the child may want to be angry, but still would give anything for their mother or father, because there is that natural strive for love and support.
In the story, the imagery that the daughter describes is very descriptive. “But on summer evenings, when the windows are open to dusk, I sometimes smell cities...wheat fields...oceans-strange smells from far away-all the places you’ve been that I never will (p 315).” The daughter is angry again here, she realizes that the mother has moved on physically without her, and tries to imagine all the time where her mother is....