Love Your Only Mother Analysis

The narrator in Love, Your Only Mother and the character Grace in Axis face tough situations that affect them for the better and for the worse. Through the use of various coping strategies, the women learn how to handle loss and they demonstrate how the quality of a relationship between a mother and a daughter affects the self both negatively and positively.

The narrator in Love, Your Only Mother frequently turns to her creativity as a means of coping with loss. Each time she receives a postcard from her mother she plays a game by “imagining [her mother] hiding somewhere in the postcards [she receives]” (Kaplan, 86). She feels as though she can transport close to her mother by retreating to the imaginative world created by the postcards. She hopes to use the technique of imagination in order to transform herself to have an interesting life with her mother, rather than the mundane perception of reality. At times, her imagination gets so carried away that she can even “sometimes smell cities… wheat fields… oceans—strange smells from far away—all the places [her mother has] been to that [she] never will. [She would] smell them as if they were not pictures on a postcard, but real, as close as [her] outstretched hand” (Kaplan, 88). This exemplifies imaginative processing during traumatic loss. Grace, in Axis, directs her emotions of loss into enthusiasm through the coping mechanism of isolation. Once Royce abandons Grace after getting caught having sex, she immediately puts her life on permanent hiatus. Instead of going back to college to finish “majoring in history [after winning] scholarships enabling [her] to do so”, she chooses to remain in the confinement of her home (Munro, 122). Grace fears facing the thought of losing her virgi...

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...ith her daughter, until she catches them doing stuff together that makes her question her opinion. Although that marked the end of the relationship, Grace’s mother still continues to support and love Grace through the breakup. She provides Grace with a home for her to stay while she mourns.

The struggle with loss remains very painful. One may experience all kinds of difficult emotions and it still may feel like the pain and sadness will never let up. Coping with the loss allows for the ability to move on. Similarly, a mother’s love weighs extremely important for a healthy emotional outcome of her child. In most cases, how she loves her child greatly affects their lives both positively and negatively. Society doesn’t emphasize the importance enough: just how important a nurturing mother is to creating adaptive human beings equipped to cope with the struggles of life.