Shadows

"When I awoke it was day; an unusual movement roused me; I looked up; I was in somebody's arms; the nurse held me; she was carrying me through the passage back to the dormitory. I was not reprimanded for leaving my bed; people had something else to think about. No explanation was afforded to my many questions; but a day or two afterward I learned that Ms. Temple, on returning t her own room at dawn, had found me laid in the little crib; my face against Helen Burns' shoulder, my arms round her neck. I was asleep, and Helen was--dead."

Envisioning this situation was simple. A poor, neglected, ten-year old Jane Eyre who awakes to find her first true friend in this world limp and pale by her side, the tremors of consumption rumbling through her body until she fell silent and cold. But to truly empathize with Jane Eyre, who has so ripely lost her one and only friend? I struggle to do so. Jane has been spurned, disregarded, paid no heed her entire life. She is finally given her first drops of sublime, sweet attention by Helen, who becomes her companion at the new boarding school she is forced to attend. The boarding school is for orphaned children, such as Jane Eyre, yet it is found to be an establishment of the highest quality in comparison to the horrific and cumbersome lifestyle endured at her Aunt's house, where Jane was no more than the punching bag for her "family" to abhor.

Will this experience affect Jane negatively and impact her life greatly, or will the loss of this first friend be only minor, a small bump in her life filled with mountainous horrors. Yet it is my belief that while this event may prove to be traumatic for Jane for the time being, it will only be a minor glitch, or setback, in what will prove to be a dark yet fruitful life of this bright young girl. The deaths of her parents will always overshadow Jane's life and whatever accomplishments she makes, as will her torturous years living in her Aunt's house, so I feel as that the death of Helen will not take as big of a toll on Jane's life.

To me, this idea of having your best friend die is such an enormous shock and would create such disarray and havoc in my life that I can barely imagine. It is a foreign idea to me, having the death of your friend be comparatively small to the other occurrences that have happened in your life. It is my hope for Jane Eyre, however, that she will be able to grow past this shadow of death and grief that has plagued her life so terribly, and will soon be surrounded by her accomplishments and successes. But then, how quickly does the shadow of death fade?

The Worst of a Bad Situation

"It took several days for me to realize Luke was not coming to my new foster home, which was nowhere near my grandfather's house. I wondered what was so horrible about me and why I had been rejected again. Then there was my perpetual question: What had I done that was so terrible that I had to be taken from my mother? I had no idea why she hadn't been able to get me back. You would think someone would have explained it in words a child could understand. Yet nobody did. I believed they were keeping secrets from me- but supposedly, they thought they were protecting me."
-Ashely Rhodes-Courter, Three Little Words

Foster care is something generally overlooked in America as an issue; most foster care homes are overrun with children and toys that many "parents" cannot remember the names of all the children they are fostering. Or the homes are so unaccustomed to the presence of children and how to deal with them that many foster kids find themselves frightened, unwelcome. Webster's defines it simply as to bring up a child that is not one's own by birth. Yet the true definition of foster care is something to be found in the stories and experiences told about it.

Foster care is traumatizing; it can be all the bad situations that can be found in a middle American low-income home all in one. There are of course, exceptions to this, but in the grand scheme of foster care, those who welcome foster children into their homes may not be the most stable of people or properly equipped to care for children. While the government may check to ensure these things, who can say what goes on behind locked doors, or what foster parents are truly like when they are not being scrutinized by the Federal Government? The negative affects of foster care are many and extreme ones at that. Child abuse is foster homes is increasingly common, and for those who enter foster care at a young age, their nuerodevelopment can be permanently messed up along with serious psychological defects.

Whether or not Ashley Rhodes-Courter experienced any of this mental damage is something we'll never know, although the physical and mental trauma displayed in her book, Three Little Words, knows no bounds. The book opens with some of the most catastrophic scenes of her life; her stepdad Dusty beating her mother, her brother that died after two months and who her mother put in a cardboard box, and, probably the most painful of all, being torn from her mother's arms as her mother got arrested and Ashley and her one surviving brother being forced into foster care. Continuing through this book will be an agonizing experience, for I know that from now on Ashley's foster care situation will worsen, rather than improve, or else there would be no story. But how on earth could this tragic story possibly worsen?

How our Relationships and Bonds Shape Us

The life of a struggling, conflicted writer is one that has been used countless times before; a cliché that we cannot escape. These striving writers are always very deep thinkers, rather scraggly people, who are unorganized due to the clutters and masses of ideas and thoughts contained in their mind. This exact character is portrayed in The World According to Garp, so why was I not so immediately repelled by this book, since I despise clichés and simply cannot stand them? I have concluded that it is the plotline of The World According to Garp that I find so intriguing, and the development of the characters found in this book. Yet when looking further, I realize that the story is just one of a struggling marriage, and how having a feminist mother and the nonexistence of a father shapes a young man's life.

The absence of a father is something I expect to take a large toll on a young man's life; meaning that later in life he will not be capable of playing the role of a father later in life, when he has children.  I expected much the same of Garp whilst reading my book, yet he seems fully capable of loving his kids to the very fullest; making them dinner every night, picking them up from their schools and clubs, worrying about their illnesses and their friends with less than reliable mothers. Garp seems like the perfect father, so how on earth could the nonexistence of one parent not have affected him? I searched the text for evidence of Garp acting as an invalid or fraudulent father, or showcase any actions that may have been better or different had he had a substantial father. But I then found myself stuck with that last thought; how would Garp have acted differently had he had a father? Would he be more levelheaded since he would have had a second parent to act as a counterpart or opposite to his mother's craziness and extreme view of men?

How would our lives be shaped differently had we not met just one single person who has influenced our life in ways that we may not realize. I try and picture my life with an absent father, a predicament such as Garp finds himself in, and I find that I would have been a very different person, one who would have more aspects of my mother's personality, and who would have had a very different sense of humor, if any at all. In the long run, I would not like the person I would be had I not had a father, or more specifically, my father. I believe it is much this way with many of the relationships I hold; had I not had those relationships and the experiences I've had and accumulated over the years, I would be an entirely different person. Which is why it is my belief that we all should value the relationships we have  even if they are awful and have no benefits, for they all teach us something and have something to offer.

Meaning of Siblings

When I was younger and incapable of reading or writing anything other than my name and repetitively singing the alphabet, I would always go along with what my mom and dad suggested for me, or told me to do. This went for whatI should wear, to what vegetables to eat, to which Sesame Street episodes I should watch and when  I should take my nap. This guidance in our earliest childhood years is necessary; how else would we learn to make decisions for ourselves in the future if we don't first see these decisions made for us. It is much the same with the books we read in our early childhood; these books are picked for us by our parents in order to instill important messages and morales that we will use later on in life. And although my parents may have chosen what books they read aloud to me, even among our collection of carefully curated children's picture books, I learned which I loved and wanted read to me over and over again, and which books I thought should have never ben put in our library in the first place. Among those of the former group there was one in particular that always stuck with me, entitled Julius the Baby of the World, by Kevin Henkes.

I always found this particular picture book interesting for many reasons. For one, its pictures are vibrant and colorful and depict the personification of mice, which is found very funny by people ages four and under, for whatever reason. Secondly, the picture book shows the relationship between an older sister and her younger baby brother, and how she learns to love him after rejecting him and hating him for taking her "place" as the one and only loved child in their family. As the story progresses, the protagonist, Lilly, meets her incredibly snobby cousin who agrees with Lilly that her new younger brother, Julius, is disgusting and repugnant, and smells awful. Lilly is suddenly taken aback, and defends her baby brother with all her heart, telling her cousin that he smells of roses and is the most beautiful baby in the world. Whilst reading, we can understand that the author wants children to absorb the meaning of sibling relationships and how important they truly are, and wants us to feel this defensiveness and love Lilly feels towards her baby brother Julius.

I think one of the reasons this book appealed to me so much when I was younger was that it put me in my sister's shoes, so to speak, so I could begin to make sense of our relationship and the different feelings she may have towards me at one point or another. My sister may have felt like she was a perfectly happy only child until I entered the world, and it makes me realize what a difficult transition it must be to have a younger sibling and to adapt to sharing everything with them, to looking out for them and caring for them. To suddenly have a new intrusion in your life that you must play with and love is something that is hard and tumultuous, and this book helped me grow up considering tha my sister doesn't have it all that easy, after all.

Confinement

We have all felt inclosed, at one point or another, felt as if we are trapped with no escape. It's a common feeling in human beings; to feel as if you are confined in a space, mental or physical, with no escape. I know that before any big test, I begin to feel trapped in my mind as I continuously review subjects and become increasingly stressed out. There's no escape- I must sit in my pool of nerves and stress until that climax of stress, when it all combines to form a tumult of unease and disquietude. This is usually when I finish my test, hand it in, and finally feel the shroud of apprehension lift from my body. But what if there was no flight from the "box" you're encased in, what if it is not mental but physical, tangible? And what if this box you are in is not a box at all, but a real, palpable room in which you have spent your whole life?

In the book Room by Emma Donoghue, Jack has spent the first five years of his adolescence trapped, literally, in a room with his mother. I have only just begun the book, but I begin to see what is terribly wrong with this situation. The book is told from the perspective Jack, and though his description of the world may not be extremely graphic, we still understand that Jack and his mother are trapped in a room where they have lived for all of Jack's five years. A mysterious man named "Old Nick" comes every night and Jack must go in what he refers to as "wardrobe", where he sleeps and hides from Old Nick. It was my first conclusion that Jack and his mother were imprisoned in a jail, yet they seem to be the only ones there, besides Old Nick who only runs their errands and comes every night to Jack's mother, who loathes him. It is now my deduction that Jack and his mother are kept in this room by Old Nick, for whatever reason, and Jack's mother and Old Nick have a sexual relationship of some sort. Whatever the reason may be, something is terribly amiss if Jack has spent the first half-decade of his life trapped in a room, without seeing anything that may be outside of the room. For a room to be the only room he knows, and for his friends to be what he refers to as "Chair" and "Rug." If the only world a five-year old knows is a 121 square-foot space, I say there is something seriously flawed in his life.

In much the same way, a child's adolescence should not consist of wartime regimes, guns, and deaths. After researching child soldiers and making observations on their lives for the past few days, I can relate both Jack's life to the lives of the child soldiers worldwide. In fact, it is my belief that the lives of child soldiers and the life of Jack are on two ends of the "trapped in a box" spectrum. Whereas child soldiers are trapped in a world of battles, the witnessing of killings, and exposure to things way beyond their years, Jack is exposed to a universe of boring nothingness, and hasn't experienced enough of the world for his age. Both child soldiers and Jack will never truly escape their box; Jack will forever be scarred by his first childhood years in the room and will have difficulties adjusting to the outside world, and child soldiers will be forever on the battlefield, their development disrupted and their nervous systems maimed. To contain a child in any sort of box; be it mental, physical, metaphorical, is abuse. Children should not be left to roam free in the streets, without any parent to love them or any sort of guidance through life, yet they should also not be so restrained that they are mentally damaged. As with most things in life, I believe the key is balance and moderation. Although from time to time, we all find ourselves in a box.

Abandoned Souls

"All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us-all who knew her-felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health...Even her waking dreams we used- to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength."
                                                -The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

To be cast off, from a group, from friends, from society, is a pain and burden so unbearable that only those who have an unmeasurable inner resilience can come away from such an experience unscarred. It hurts to be forgotten, or discarded, from a group of people, especially by those whom you loved. We've all probably been disposed of in such a manner by a group of people; whether it was in grade school, and you weren't allowed to play with a certain group of people because they had forbade it, or one of your friends decided that you were freakish and strange and went to go find another group of friends to hang out with. Perhaps it's simply a teacher who no longer wants to listen to your answers, and ignores you, and you are cast off there, as well.

My experience with being "cast off" involved one of my childhood best friends, who I've known since kindergarden. I was friends with her from the very beginning of my adolescence, since the first day of kindergarden, when we chose line partners and our hands met over another whimpering girl, who could not find a line partner. We both asked one another if we wanted to be partners, simultaneously, and I can still hear our laughter as we interrupted one another, excitedly talking. That was the true initiation of our friendship; it continued all throughout elementary school. She was my best friend, or one of them, at least. She was hilarious, and we were always laughing, or abusing her pets and making her dog and cat fight each other. We began to grow apart when I was about 10 or 11. I can't really discern who cast who off, who forgot the other and went on to find other friends. At first, I wanted to blame her for the destruction of our friendship, for casting me off and forgetting about me to go find other friends. This is usually not the case, however. I feel guilt for shutting her out, for neglecting our friendship and failing to salvage it. But in this situation, it doesn't matter who cast who off, for it injured and marred us in our own separate ways.

This same cast-off role is apparent in Toni Morrison's book The Bluest Eye. The story is told from the point of view of a girl named Claudia, yet Claudia is a mere observer. It is my opinion that the true protagonist is a girl named Pecola, for the story is centered around her. Pecola is a girl living in a predominantly black neighborhood; northern slums where racism is prevalent. She is beaten by her mother, and constantly watches her mother and father engage in horrid assaults of one another. Pecola is constantly referred to as "ugly" and "odd" by the members of her neighborhood, her family receiving these labels as well. When she is around 12 years of age, Pecola is raped and impregnated by her father, and becomes even more of a social pariah than she previously was. Although her baby dies, the imprint of what was done to her remains, and people cast Pecola off and use her as their punching bag, their source of happiness and reassurance, for when they see Pecola in all her grime and filth, they see themselves as being better, as being more substantial people. When they see what has been done to Pecola by her father, they look at themselves as being virtuous and pure. Pecola stifles the insecurities of people in her neighborhood, and makes them feel secure in their own bodies, for she herself is a monstrosity. It is my belief that all of us who are cast out in one way or another act as a suppressor of personal vulnerabilities for those who cast us out. When those who cast us off look at us, they see all of their greatness compared to all of our flaws, and all of the difficulties we have suffered, and how much better their lives have been in comparison to this. We act as a constant reminder of the guilt they feel for casting us off, yet also as a washcloth or rag that they may clean themselves with, so that they may shine in our gloominess.

The Figurative Egg

I believe that all of us, at one point or another in our lives, have attempted at covering our insecurities and vulnerabilities from others, so as that others cannot find that fragility within you and use it as a weapon, to maim and wound your feelings. I am an extremely sensitive person, and have been all my life. It is a topic I avoid at all costs; I deny it to anyone who seems to have discovered this defect. When I was very young, it was something I dealt with through tears and complaining. Over the years, this sensitivity has shrunk into a small, hardened ball inside of me, only to come out and arise when I am unable to swallow it, to control it. Dark humor and laughing at myself is what gets me by, and it has taken years and years of practice at containing my feelings, and redirecting them into work, or humor.

Whilst reading "Am I Blue?"by Bruce Coville, I thought about what I hide, what I cover up from others, and how much I can relate to Butch Carrigan, and the republican Congressman, who are both covering up their sexualities. I myself am not covering up my sexuality, or covering my sensitivity through violence or insufferable words. But I can definitely relate.

And while thinking about how relatable these characters happen to be, I also began to think about  society and the way people view and react to people's sexualities. Do people who are exploring their sexualities always get treated in the way that Vincent is treated in this short story? Are people who are possibly gay always greeted with the same daily fear of being bullied at school, taunted for being different? I pondered this as I sat reading the story, wondering if people do indeed suffer this torture every single day of their middle school and high school lives. After I had mulled over the troubles that Butch Carrigan inflicts upon Vincent, perhaps I am not all that much like him. In the opening paragraphs of "Am I blue?", we are greeted with an image of Vincent being kicked around in the mud by his nemesis, the bully that has scarred him both emotionally and physically for many years, simply because Vincent may or may not be gay. Vincent is then introduced to his "fairy godfather" who is willing to grant Vincent three wishes. Vincent is then given the power to see whether or not people are gay, or what degree their homosexuality is by the amount of blue their skin is pigmented with. Over the course of the story, Vincent learns that about 1 in every 10 people is a dark, vivid blue, and about 1 in every 4 people is at least tinted blue. Vincent also discovers that a Republic Congressman, who is famed for being a homophobe, is also a very bright shade of blue, and Vincent's bully Butch Carrigan, is "...blue as a summer sky..." When reading, I came to the realization that many people hide their sexuality through supposed hatred of gay people, or by saying foul things towards homosexuals to cover up what they are too frightened to admit. I myself do cover up my sensitivity with humor, and try as much as possible to be indifferent towards people, and, at times, I can be harsh towards others. I loathe myself for this. And while I interpreted this semi-hatred for myself for being abrasive and unfeeling towards others, I truly discovered how I relate to these characters, for they, too, feel a certain amount of animosity towards themselves.

It is much the case with the Republican Congressman; he covers his sexuality through hateful words and slogans that condone hatred towards gays. By doing so, this Republican Congressman defers attention away from what his sexuality is, and makes people focus on how much he supposedly hates homosexuals. In a way, he probably does hate people who are openly gay, for they had the strength to do what he couldn't ever muster the courage to do; to come out of the closet. This republican Congressman has to live behind a mask of his own insecurities his whole life, for he never had the strength to be honest with himself and others. It is much the same for Butch Carrigan, the bully that has tormented Vincent for so many years. Butch uses violence and foul words to exploit his supposed heterosexuality, when in reality must also feel a certain hatred for himself for never being honest, and for bullying Vincent when Vincent was one person in their school he could probably relate the most to. People who are homosexual and afraid to admit it, or simply people in general who are afraid of being honest about something for fear of being bullied or unaccepted will go to many lengths to protect themselves, and will form a hard shell of detestable words said towards gays, or rumored hatred towards gays so as that people are not able to penetrate their hard shell and hurt what lies underneath. I have a hard shell, and I have soft feelings that lay underneath that are fragile. In a way, I am much like an egg. I am fragile; which is attributable to my sensitive feelings, and although I do not cover this sensitivity through brutality, I am still composed of the same material as Butch Carrigan, and the Republican Congressman.