The main character Bone’s constant loyalty to her mother, Annie, throughout majority of Dorothy Allison’s novel Bastard Out of Carolina really impacted me. Every time Bone clung to her mother’s hip and buried her face into her side, I thought of myself. I wanted to scream at Bone that her mother may love her but that love is no longer enough. I wanted so badly to pick Bone up and walk hand and hand with her to one of her aunts’ places to stay. I wanted to get Bone away from the abuse, to give her some semblance of stability, an atmosphere of family and love. While reading some of the last scenes in the novel, my stomach churned uneasy, my heart squeezed painfully, my eyes swelled slowly up like a tide.
My parents divorced when I was in the sixth grade. I
lived with my mother primarily until midway through my junior year of high
school. One night, we had a dramatic argument complete with a yelling match.
She had had enough and told me to call my father and have him come pick me up.
Said she was done and couldn’t “do this” anymore. My heart was both empty and
full of rage that night. That memory mirrors a thought Bone has when she stayed
at her Aunt Raylene’s after the last time Daddy Glen had assaulted her, “My
mama had abandoned me, and that was the only thing that mattered,” (Allison 302).
I was angry with my mother for a long time for kicking me out. I had been a
mother to her and myself for majority of my life, so why was she kicking me
out? I had done nothing wrong but asked her to love me, take care of me, choose
me over the alcohol, and choose me over her boyfriend. Another quote from Bone
connects to that memory as well, “How do you forgive somebody when you cannot
even speak her name, when you cannot stand to close your eyes and see her face?”
(Allison 302). Months later, when my mother finally worked up the courage to
look my in the eye and speak to me at one of my school events (which she had
started recently attending to try to work her back into my life), it was the
most uncomfortable moment I may have ever had with her. To see her hunched
shoulders, the hesitancy in her smile, the fear in her eyes, her disheveled
appearance compared to the country-club-socialite with the bubbly attitude and
pristine appearance I remembered from my childhood…. I didn’t recognize her. I
wanted to fold her taller, 5-9 frame into my arms, run my hand down her brittle,
unkept hair, and tell her everything would be alright. That we could be a
family again, but as Bone said, “I wanted to tell her lies, tell her that I had
never doubted her, that nothing could make any difference to my love for her,
but I couldn’t. I had lost my mama. She was a stranger, and I was so old my
insides had turned to dust and stone” (Allison 306).
My mother and I have made up since then, our relationship
slowing still mending with time and distance. The song “Never Grow Up” by Taylor
Swift reminds me of what I wanted my mother treat me like as a child and “Landslide”
by the Dixie Chicks reminds me of many experiences throughout my life that
after, I distinctly remember feeling more grown up after—older, wiser,
sometimes even more so than my parents and other adults in my life.
“Never Grow Up” by Taylor
Swift
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4gEM7w98wM
“Landslide” by Dixie Chicks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4_wXPZ1Bnk
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