The story for this week’s course is Tillie Olsen’s Tell Me A Riddle, a title suited to this short story about a mother, and the view of her firstborn. While seemingly direct, it had moments that were more abstract in language and harder to follow but felt necessary to convey the expressions of love and affection she had for her daughter.
The narrator spends this story talking about her eldest, Emily, and reminisces on the experiences she had as a young mother with a newborn child, newly single from her partner, Emily’s father, having left the picture while Emily was still an infant. She discusses her life with Emily, the way she had to sacrifice time spent with her for the sake of work, the trials of war, and the general trials that came with any new mother handling the role of motherhood, especially as the only involved parent in said child’s life. She discusses the different ways in which she fretted and worried over Emily, in ways that felt as if she could hardly get a grip on the ways that she loved her, despite the conflicting situations of Emily’s childhood. Her narrative feels overwhelmed in all the affection she feels towards Emily, even if she does not know how to express it properly. An example of this is the way she discusses that she may not smile enough at her, and how it does not take away from the love she feels.
It seems to consume every bit of the narrator’s being, so to speak, in this conflicted battle of the love she feels versus the parts of daughter that she can’t seem to understand, the way that there were times that she could not recognize who her daughter was capable of being, in comparison to how she knew Emily. It feels like a distinct look into the trials of motherhood, and all that comes with it, fulfilling or otherwise, and was a piece I enjoyed greatly. It was especially interesting to me that it was focused specifically on the firstborn, as it showed me that there would be different experiences and emotions faced with a firstborn as a new mother versus the children after. This is not to say that she loved them less, just that the love seemed to manifest differently according to each child.
As someone who has no concept of what that attachment to your child feels like, and has no intention to partake in that aspect of life, the narrative was engaging and still managed to have the reader have a sense of empathy for the narrator, and all the emotions that are involved when taking the role of mother.
Coming to Age 