“she answered only by a slight wriggle of her behind”
but also of the fathers distancing from his own daughters
“he wanted urgently to get away, to escape.”
This has a very strong effect on the reader meaning that instead of them empathizing with the father, they are instead empathizing with the children as it is them who are being effected by their fathers absence. Conversely in Your shoes the audience is more likely to empathize more with the mother than with the child. The mother’s desperation is clearly shown and is represented by the metaphorical use of the shoes to symbolize her daughter. It as if that both sets of parents are longing for things which are not in the best interest of their children but are just a selfish representation of their own needs.
It is as though time is the missing factor in both sets of parents lives, firstly it is as if they have not spent enough time with their children resolving problems affecting their relationship (mother and father in Your shoes do not try and talk, but instead shout and call names e.g. ‘slut ’and in Growing up the father is always out, either at work or escaping family life “till the kids were in bed”) and secondly it is as though they have lost alL sense of time and forgotten that their children are growing up and maturing.
The structures of the stories strongly reflect the parents mentality. In Growing up the story has a chronological order resulting in a straight forward journey: this is exactly how the father’s life is on a day to day basis, it is all very simple; having a chronological order depicts a very predicting future just as the father has. Likewise Your shoes has a structure that resembles the mothers mentality: the ambiguous structure is strongly similar to the mothers mental stability ( very confused and jumbled). The endings of each story are very conclusive in total different ways, Your shoes ending is only conclusive about the mental state of the narrator (mother)- nothing else; whereas Growing up has a more poignant realization where the father realizes that he has pushed his daughter so far away she is returning the rejection. Similarly both stories end with the main deluded parents alone; childless.
The mother in Your shoes is shown to be at fault when she says of how she never used to breastfeed her daughter, not because she did not breastfeed her, but because she is allowing her daughter to blame her for more things by giving her unnecessary information that the daughter would not even remember herself: this makes us think whether she has said other things to instigate her daughters repelling ways. At the heart of this story there is the poignant image of the maternal cradling of the new shoes that the daughter had rejected. However in Growing up there is no evidence to the father’s emotional state in comparison to the mothers in Your shoes. He shows no longing or remorse for his children. The reprehension of the two characters are however clear.
It is evident from both texts that the parents are unfamiliar with their children. In Your shoes the mother thinks that her daughter will be fond of the curtains that she had purchased for her, and likewise the father in Growing up was surprised at how the girls behaved both with him and towards their dog, “snort”.
The fact that the writer implies that the mother in Your shoes is an insecure woman, who is intrusive and controlling underlines her self pity and delusion. Furthermore Growing up suggests that the father is deluded and selfish by stating how he wears a suit he does not like (deluded as he thinks this is ok) and that he wanted to go to the club to escape his family even though he says it will be boring. The father may also be very self conscious especially in reflection to his vanishing dignity and his concerns about the meaning of his life, especially now his children are becoming independent.
The main parents’ partners (mother in Growing up and father in Your shoes) have their own faults and these are not compensated for in the story. In growing up the mother is very selfish and tied up with her committee work rather than her children, however it is strange how the girls behave in a very demure way when they are in the company of their mother (become well dressed and are very polite). In Your shoes it is the father whom has caused the main problems to the parent’s relationship with their daughter by referring to her as a “dirty slut”; however the father is a very elusive person who appears only indirectly as a cause of his daughter’s unhappiness.
Conclusively both stories depict and emphasize both parents’ faults and mistakes clearly and also the children’s actions following the faults. At the end of both stories the reader is totally resigned to the endings and circumstances of both omniscient parents.