Short Story / Spirit of Hope (Analysis)
Spirit of Hope
As the day drew to a close my mother’s face gradually discarded the shroud of weariness that had plagued her from sun up. She began to smile easily again. Her beautiful smile is the light of my world. I seldom talk about my mother, but today I make an exception as I make this entry into my diary.
It is no small task being the first of four children. For the greater part of two decades I’ve handled my platoon of siblings reasonably well. Incidentally we are all girls. Although we are sisters, we aren’t strictly so in the biological sense. My mother has been married twice, and is currently raising us on her own. Before you play judge, jury & executioner all rolled in one and condemn her guilty you must know her story.
Once she was young and vibrant, and dared to dream dreams. Never could there be found a frown upon her brow. She lived for the moment and was the queen of her world. That was until tragedy struck. The cold hand of death snatched her father from her. A terrible blow to one so young. His untimely demise was the start in a long line of a series of unfortunate events to befall her. Her mother, a naïve and uneducated woman, saw it fit to send her off to marriage. She’d called my mother into her room 3 weeks after the burial and said, “Maria, my daughter. I cannot afford you the life your father provided you with when he was alive. But I can act in your best interest. So I have decided to marry you off to Gregory, the trader. He is decent and is more capable of taking care of you than I am. I know you will understand.” And that was that. My mother was whisked away to the house of a man a few years shy of her father’s age. But she didn’t complain. No. She never uttered so much as a word in protest to her predicament. She obeyed her mother and was led like a lamb to the slaughter to meet her ‘dearly beloved’. She was and has always been longsuffering. This trait of hers’ I don’t appreciate. I’m not the only one who feels this way, my sisters and I are in the same league. We are often very obstinate in defiance to our mother’s humble spirit. And it sometimes pleases us when she abandons her meek resolve to tackle our issues with forceful resolution.
Ten years came and went by. My mother was still the devout wife of the trader. During this time she had her greatest achievements, which I’m proud to say are my sister and me. Don’t get me wrong now, I‘ve nothing against my half-sisters. It’s just that if you’ve ever been with someone from the very start and understood what they’ve been through, no finer testament can be written of those trying times than the fruits of the struggle. I and my sister are just that, my mother’s finest fruits.
Gregory on the other hand wasn’t too pleased with my mother. Here was a woman who sacrificed her whole life on the altar of obedience. Abandoned her education, did away with her friends, bore his two children and served him faithfully and dutifully without a complaint for more than a decade. What more could he ask for? Well, let me tell you. Sons. That’s what he wanted. Someone to carry on his family name. A name is as good as useless, unless the bearer of the name distinguishes himself. Unfortunately, my father couldn’t see the fine line. His much desired sons could be truant, and drag the name he strove so hard to attain in the deepest of mud and there would be nothing he could do about it dead or alive. This cultural reasoning has always struck me as myopic and pathetic. More so because it brought my mother great grief.
So it happened, Gregory the trader, decided it was in his best interest to have sons and he married a second wife. A real fire brand, who bore him more sons than he wanted (Her first issue was a set of triplet boys) and who made my mother’s life a living hell. My mother was reduced to a slave in her own home. Forced to evacuate her matrimonial bed for another woman and resigned to menial tasks around the house. Answering the every beck and call of Linda, her mate. Never did she for once rant, rave or curse Linda or my father for her misfortune. She went about every task with a cherry of a smile. She bathed Linda’s three boys, fed them, clothed them and gave them more love then they would ever get from their mother. Who was busy courting public attention as the wife who bore my father’s sons.
In the end my mother’s patience wasn’t rewarded. Gregory died, as all men do, at the hands of bandits on his return from business. His death inspired no small measure of loss in my mother. She deeply mourned her husband. Linda, on the other hand, was overjoyed to be rid of the ‘senile old man’ as she always called him behind his back. With the same vigour with which she pursued life, she immediately turned us all into the streets. My mother lacked the ferocity to match Linda. She didn’t lift a finger in protest at being denied her possessions as the first wife. “Let it be, my daughters” she said “Linda has sons, and as customary, only male children inherit what belonged to their fathers. We will find a way”.
Even then, I never understood my mother’s attitude. Till date I’m still perplexed that any human being in the face of such injustice wouldn’t protest or raise hell at such ill treatment. I for one can never stand for such. My experiences have made me a fighter to the death. So my mother let the triplets, who were incapable of feeding themselves or uttering one intelligible sound, inherit my father’s property. And Linda and her relatives feasted on the blood, sweat and tears of my mother’s ten year long marriage to Gregory.
We moved back into my grandfather’s empty house and begun to pick the pieces of our lives again. Grandmother had died 3 years earlier. It was no small task for a woman and her two daughters in a society where women were treated as second class citizens. But we had each other and that was enough. My mother had always dreamed of being a fashion designer. Tall dreams for a girl from a small village, wouldn’t you agree? Well she had the chance to pursue that dream. The savings she had made from assisting her husband she used to purchase her first sewing machine. It was her pride and joy. She would look at it for hours on end and tell me and my sister “That my little angels is going to take us to a better life” Sure enough she was true to her words but their fulfillment took a long time coming.
Mother worked like a machine. Day and night she hemmed and stitched, creating splendid clothing for all those who patronized her. The money she made she divided in three. For our education, for savings and the third part for our upkeep. At that tender age I and my sister had wisdom beyond our years and I don’t mean to gloat. We understood our mother absolutely, without need for any verbal communication. We put our best into everything we did. It was either a hundred percent or nothing. The small measure of joy my mother had every day was that her daughters excelled at anything and everything they put their minds to. But alas, the trials of my mother were not over yet. Matters of the heart prevailed over her.
Like any person who once had ambition and drive, failure isn’t an obstacle but a training ground. My mother was one of such people. She had failed in her marriage, but she was determined to fulfill her childhood fantasies of love. After all she wasn’t an old maid yet. Thus when love manifested in the form of my English Literature teacher mother took the chance. Her heart yearned to love, for the first time.
Mike personified all my mother’s dreams of an ideal man. Caring, gentle and understanding. Above all he had aspirations. He didn’t want to remain a literature teacher the rest of his life in a village school. He wanted to go to the city and make something of himself. Mother believed he was the right person to be a father to her daughters and aid her in achieving her lifelong dreams. Their romance blossomed. From the formal relationship between a teacher and a parent into a friendship and finally marriage. The first year of my mother’s marriage, I can honestly say was the happiest year of my mother’s life. That same year we all moved to the city. In the three years that followed mother’s tailoring business flourished, Mike got a good job and she bore Mike two daughters. It was the picture perfect life she had always longed for. However, her joy was short-lived for the shadow of tragedy struck again. Only this time it wasn’t death but a closet habit of my stepfather’s.
Mike increasingly became absent from the house. Often would he spend long hours out and return in the dead of the night reeking of alcohol. My mother as always tried to conceal the problem but we her oldest daughters knew as much. Our stepfather was a chronic alcoholic. He drank in merriment and drank in sorrow. Life was good at the time and their incomes soared and with it his drinking. Mother did everything in her power to save him from himself but it was all to no avail. It wasn’t long before his habit got public attention and it cost him his job. He should have kept his skeleton in his cupboard. His unemployment was the beginning of his downward spiral. Mike drank to no end. Yet mother didn’t hold it against him “Everyone has their faults” she said “it’s up to us the stronger ones to help them through their trying times” and that was exactly what she did, till the day alcohol took Mike from her. She nursed him night and day when he was in the hospital dying of liver cirrhosis. And she mourned him passionately when the doctors pronounced him dead.
That was years ago and nothing I know has ever put my mother down. She dusted the bad memories off and lived for us, her daughters. Working relentlessly to ensure we lack nothing, or want nothing but most of all giving us her unconditional love. Grace finally found my mother and her toils were rewarded beyond measure. A wealthy client of hers’ accepted her business proposal and today my mother owns her own fashion house. No one would have ever thought an uneducated girl from the village would get this far, but she has and is still going places. Everyday she tells us “Regret of the past and Fear of the future, steals the present. And the present is all we have” I have come to look upon those words as the driving force of my life. Whenever I am beset with problems, mere trivialities when compared to hers’, I get up and face them head on with a sense of optimism. As I end this entry I’ll be forever grateful to my mother for instilling in me a Spirit of Hope.
BY: Osang Abang.
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This is a heartwarming story of a family and it’s struggles at a different time. You have vividly given us a portrait of a woman the narrator obviously loves very much. The writing is precise and well done.
I do however find the story overly sentimental for my tastes. It seems as if you were in such a rush to give the mother a happy ending that you glanced over most of the story. This feels like an outline for a novel. There is so much content here that is undiscovered. We start with the Death of the Mother’s father and an arranged marriage to a man around her father’s age. This situation reminds me of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House”. Never the less it at feels glanced over like you are telling us, but never showing us. Then you go on and we find out he is not happy for the soul reason that the mother has not given him a boy. By the way continuity-wise you say early on that you have half sisters but then go on to talk about the half brothers that come from the second wife. Obviously this is a polygamist relationship and that is also some that seems to be glanced over.
Then the first husband dies and she remarries. A year later she discovers he is an alcoholic.
Without going into every detail of the story My point is this: I want story and characters. Right now all I have is basic outline of a plot. I can see from this piece that you are a fantastic writer, but the story is not working yet because it is so lacking of detail. I would say slow down and go through each of these plots and subplots individually. Give the characters life and the readers a reason to keep reading. So far that is not being done.
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