Renewed Hope

Mary Hood’s “How Far She Went” and Tillie Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing” capture the trauma of an unstable childhood. Hood writes of a painful past that controls how a grandmother and girl (her granddaughter) react to each other. Both are in pain and deal with it differently. Olsen writes of a struggling young post-depression mother who is unable to be a complete mother to her daughter Emily. The relationship between the mother figures and the daughter figures is not so different. They share the same pain but they deal with it differently. This pain originates from the love that they have experienced and been hurt by before. Girl and Emily have both been abandoned in one way or another and they have put a certain distance between themselves and their mother figures. The grandmother and the mother come from different angles but are connected on that they knew how to do for their daughter/ granddaughter.
In both stories, the young girls were abandoned. The girl in Mary...