Response to Emily's "With Sweat Stripes Across Our Bellies"

Dear Emily,

This story was about an adult woman dealing with her mother's decline in health as she grows older. It deals with the role reversal when the mom needs to be taken care of like a child.

There were a lot of wonderful details in this story that made it very authentic. For example, the image of the white doilies on pg. 1 and the brief information about the family lineage on pg. 2, as well as the specifics of stuffing the pig stomachs on pg. 4, made me feel that this story was very real and alive. I also really appreciated the inclusion of the slogan for Whery's on pg. 2, because the humor in the pun provided some necessary relief from the more serious subject matter of the piece.

I think it was very effective how you connected the memory of working in the garden with the mom during the summer to the final morning scene where the daughter is tending the garden while the mother is sitting in the lawn chair nearby. It gave a sense of unity to the piece that was very necessary.

As far as suggestions go, there were a few things that bothered me. For instance, if the mother is deaf, how is she talking? Is she not completely deaf? Or is she using sign language to communicate? Is the conversation a memory that happened before the mother completely lost her hearing? A sentence or two of exposition could quickly resolve this confusion and make things much clearer. I also was confused by the fact that the mother could no longer work by the time the narrator was five (this is on pg. 2). Why couldn't she work? Had she already started to lose her hearing?

One final concern is the return of the conversation about the pills. About the third time we came back to it, I became convinced that some grand disaster was about to take place with the medication, and when it didn't, the end felt very anticlimactic. Maybe if you just combined the second and third times this conversation appears, I wouldn't have begun to think that something horrific was about to happen. Also, the sentence "You can't take that medicine twice" on pg. 3 seemed particularly ominous to me. Maybe something less absolute would have a gentler effect. "You shouldn't take that medicine twice" or "You know the doctor said not to..." or "You don't need to...". It's just something to think about.

Thanks for writing!

Sincerely,

Christina