Mother's Precious Character Analysis

The way a child is raised serves as a precedent in determining who the child will become once he or she is an adult. There are many children who have overcome unfortunate situations in their childhood and have become successful individuals despite the negative factors they have faced. Then again, there have also been many situations where a child is raised in an upscale community surrounded by successful people and have grown to make negative decisions leading to ineffectiveness in life.

Many factors play a significant role in forming a teen’s identity. A relationship between mother and daughter can be very powerful. Precious’ mother, Mary is an extremely negative influence on her. Mary mistreats Precious and treats her as if she is worthless.

Mary herself feels worthless which is why she feels as if she needs to belittle Precious and make her feel as insecure about herself as she does.

The abuse she faces from her mother is both sexual and unusual. She forces Precious to eat when she is not hungry. Mary does not move much around her house since she demands Precious to cook, clean, and wait on her hand and foot because of this she is overweight. She chooses to stay home and block off the world. Forcing her depression onto Precious is the way she copes with everything going on around her. Mary has no friends or family who she can speak to. Precious only sees her grandmother when she brings Little Mongo around so the social worker can think that Little Mongo is being taken care of by Mary. Family unity is not something that Precious has in her life. Mary has not left her home since Mongo was born due to her depression. Precious expresses her feelings about her mother throughout Push. As she gets ready for her first day at the alternative school she says, “I don’t smell like my muver. I don’t”. Precious does not want to be like her mother in any way. On page 35, she contemplates being

on welfare on her own and not on her mother’s welfare which only benefits her mother and not her and Mongo. She says,” I have to say sometimes I hate my muver. She don’t love me. I wonder how she could love Little Mongo”. Her mother is so emotionally shut down that Precious wonders how her mother can ever care about her or her daughter. Mary is detached from reality and her way of dealing with the situations going on around her is by not facing them head on and by using Precious as a crutch.
Precious’ parents both are very far from nurturing.

Her father also abuses her sexually. As she becomes older, her point of view on men is altered. A father is a man in a girl’s life who is supposed to protect her from danger and yet her father is the source of continual sexual abuse. Mary is aware of the sexual abuse that Precious has been going through but does nothing to stop it. In chapter 1, Precious says “This time I know Mama know. Umm hmmm, she know. She bring him to me”. Her mother’s low self-esteem is so low that in order to have Precious’ father around she chooses to not acknowledge the sexual abuse Precious has been experiencing almost all of her life. Love is an affection that Precious’ has never felt. This is why Precious is overcome with emotion when she has her first baby, Mongo, and the nurse at the hospital is comforting her and letting her know that she will get through this situation that she been forced to be in. At this moment she is experiencing something that her mother and father have never made her feel,

comfort.
A mother and father are supposed to protect and lead their daughter through the right direction and show her self-worth. Faced with negative social issues as well as abuse leads to Precious becoming an adult at a very young age. When you are being abused, school and life become very difficult to deal with. In the beginning of Push Precious has only one goal and that is to survive. As we read further into Push we can see how Precious slowly but surely wants to overcome her situation and even leave her mother’s grasp once she is older and has an education. She acts on these dreams of independence by attending the alternative school, Each One Teach One after being kicked out of I.S. 146 for being pregnant. She strives to become someone far from who her mother is. Many children are forced to live in homes where sexual abuse is normal with no one to protect them or guide them. But, who these children become because of it is up to them. An unfortunate past does not need to define you, it can be the force to make you become a better person and not just a statistic of abuse.