People Aren't Born "Assholes"

 Can you imagine having a mom like that. I would hate my life.

    Wildwood is a "long short story" as my teacher said written by Junot Diaz in 2007. He has no filter and uses words like "ass", "chick", "bitch", and also Spanish terms throughout the story. I find that very interesting because I have never seen that in any other novel or story but I think it was needed in this one, to show how rude and mean the mom is to her daughter.

    Wildwood is about a daughter and a mom that have a very bad relationship. The mom treats her daughter like she is nothing, at the beginning of the story we understand that the mom just discovered she had breast cancer. The daughter has to do the groceries, make food, clean the house, and take care of her brother because her mom doesn't want to do anything and works two jobs at the same time. Both women always yell at each other, and swear at each other; they barely talk about normal things in life. The daughter makes decisions for herself that the mother doesn't appreciate but it doesn't matter to the young teenager. She becomes a punk and finds a boyfriend older than her. The boyfriend's life is also atrocious and he treats her that way, atrociously. The daughter, not knowing anything better, decides to leave her home and live with her boyfriend for a while. Fast forward, she called home to talk to her brother and ask him to bring her, her clothes and her money in bags, and to come alone. Obviously, the brother didn't listen and brought the mother with him. The daughter tried to escape and the mother was chasing her, when the girl looked back to see where her mother was she saw the mom on the ground crying. She then came back to come to help her because even though they didn't like each other, she was still her mom. The mom was faking and caught her to bring her back home. The story ends with the daughter living in Santo Domingo with her grandmother. She has a boyfriend and is happier than ever. We also learned that according to grandma the mother treated her daughter like that because she didn't want the teenager to become like herself.

    Throughout the whole story, I hated the mom and questioned everything she did or said. I was always so confused. Why would anyone treat her child that way? The story doesn't give us too much information on the background of the family, therefore I had no idea if it was because of the daughter's past or the mother's parents or anything else. the author made it sound like the mother just hated her daughter. The grandmother says something to the daughter towards the end and I think it explains a lot."Your mother didn't run away. We had to send her away. To keep her from being murdered. To keep us all from being murdered. She didn't listen and she fell in love with the wrong man". In my opinion, this shows that the mother made mistakes, learned from them, and tried to protect her daughter from making the same exact mistakes. Did she use the right techniques to do it? No, I don't think so because the daughter made the exact same mistake, and fell in love with the wrong guy.

    I think this is a very good representation of parenting in real life. I ain't no parent and won't be for a long time but looking at kids I know and how they were treated at home, I can see resemblances and differences. I think when parents protect their kids too much it doesn't help the children, I think it does the opposite. It leads them in a bad direction. Kids will make mistakes and it's normal, parents have to help them find a way out of it and not make that same mistake again. Children have to be taught how to make good decisions for themselves, not wait for their parents to choose everything for them. 

    People aren't born "assholes", they become one with time.