As She Grows

ENGLISH CPT : ESSAY by: Jacquelin Chan

“And it’s another thing to have that one person not love you back, not the way you want them to.” (Cowan 106). As She Grows by Lesley Anne Cowan tells us the story of a teenaged girl, Snow, who grew up with no mother or father. The person that acted as her “parent” was her grandmother, a drunkard. Growing up with no love at home, she leaves for a group home. It is there she makes her life changing decision. To keep her child and to give her a home showered with love and happiness. Throughout this book, the author shows Snow’s journey, separation when she leaves her grandmother, initiation when she gets pregnant and decides to keep the child, and return, when she decides to return to her former life in order to raise Betty. In As She Grows, Snow struggles to show her daughter the love that she had never experienced, so that her child might have the life she never had, filled with love and care, demonstrating the power of love to transform lives.

The most significant reason for this was the lack of family love for Snow. Snow grows up with her grandmother, an alcoholic. Her mother drowned and her father is unknown. She grows up used to feeling needed by her grandmother, but she is tired of following her grandmother’s crazy antics. She finally decides to leave her grandmother and moves into a group home. “I wait to feel something, anything other than this blankness inside.” (Cowan 277). Snow leaves her grandmother, hoping for a better future, away from her grandmother. When she first arrives at the group home, she finds some bad in each person, giving her a reason for her to hate them at first sight. Yet soon, she discovers that she was wrong and finds qualities in them for her to appreciate. Her “parents” are now composed of a group of people called “Staff”. The way Staff acts like a parental figure makes Snow feel a deficiency of love, even away from her grandmother. “At some point, I saw them differently and I actually wanted to belong.” (Cowan 207). Even though she did not like the group home or the people living there at first, she learns that they were good friends to her when she needed them to be there for her.

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Another reason for her change is that Snow slowly learns to put trust in her friends. When Snow finds out that she is pregnant, she tries to accept the truth by herself. Yet, she soon finds out that this is too much for her to carry by herself, so she tells this secret to one person. Each person living in a group home is assigned to a counselor. To Snow, going to a counselor is her price to stay in a group home. Her counselor, Eric, slowly persuades her to tell him about her reasons of leaving her grandmother. Soon, she breaks down and tells him why she left and even about her pregnancy. “Some words spill out of me and other are forced through my throat.” (Cowan 178). At thins point, Snow tells Eric that she is tired, that she does not want to plan her next step in life. She tells him, “I have no fight left in me.” (Cowan 179). After her friend Jasmyn’s persuasion, she tells the group home and Staff that she is pregnant. Soon, Snow learns that sometimes outsiders that are not related to you in any way can become the closest people in the world, the ones you can rely on most. To Snow, going to this group home was her life-changing decision that altered her future for the better.

The final reason for this change is to show the maternal love she never received in her childhood to her baby daughter, Betty. Snow struggles to understand the meaning of maternal love. In the very last line of the book, “If I rise in you, bury me.” (Cowan 289). She tells her daughter that if Snow’s life is going to be seen in Betty, she must somehow break away from it. A couple weeks after Betty’s birth, she tells her daughter, “People are afraid I won’t know how to love you.” (Cowan 225). Snow believes that she will find that courage and bravery in her that is needed to take care of her. Snow is a perfect portrayal of a victim of a society. Society thinks that all teenaged mothers will not know how to love their children. “Moments when I think, I can actually do this.” (Cowan 126). Snow sometimes has doubts about her ability to raise her daughter, but she also has times where she knows that she can raise her daughter, and not allow her to relive her own life’s journey. Yet Snow is not so confident for the majority of the time. “Look away from her piercing eyes and whisper, ‘I’m sorry’, into her soft skin.” (Cowan 277). Snow worries that her daughter’s present and future. In the present, Snow is afraid she will not know how and when to love her. In the future, Snow is afraid about what life her daughter will choose to take. She wants the best life possible for Betty, and Snow thinks the life she had was the worst life imaginable, a kind of life she doesn’t want Betty to have.

In the last two lines of As She Grows, “If I rise, bury me. If I rise in you, bury me.” (Cowan 289). Snow’s difficulties in raising Betty are shown. Her lack of parental love in her childhood has caused Snow to learn maternal love for her child, because she does not want Betty following in her old steps. Even near death, Snow still wants the best for her daughter. She loves her and says that if her bad characteristics or her life ever appear to surface in Betty’s life, she is to bury all of this.

WORKS CITED

Cowen, Anne. As She Grows: Canada, Penguin Group, 2003.