Keywords
Essay, motherhood, alzheimer's disease, family, child abuse
Abstract
Pebbles and Shards is a collection of personal essays based on family relationships that focus upon motherhood, responsibility, and the complexity of love and loss. The essays explore how people cope with the inevitability of loss and how they move beyond that loss to find something meaningful, perhaps even beautiful. They reflect upon success and failure in the face of loss and how, either way, life goes on, heedless of people’s desires and plans. The essays in Pebbles and Shards, while meant to stand alone, are thematically connected so that, read together, each story resonates with the others. In “Promises,” I explore the fear of watching my mother die of Alzheimer’s disease. In related essays “Frame by Frame” and “In Darkness,” I focus on my mother’s efforts to struggle with Alzheimer’s and how, as an adopted daughter, I underwent a role-reversal and became the mother figure. Other essays, such as “Heart of a Deadhead” and “Circus,” consider the mothering impulse, especially the guilt and conflict that so often accompany my desire to nurture others. In attempting to support and strengthen those who seem “weak,” I have sometimes found that my own actions and thoughts underscore a deeper weakness in myself. As a collection, Pebbles and Shards contemplates the suffering and joy that is a family
Notes
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Graduation Date
2013
Semester
Spring
Advisor
Bartkevicius, Jocelyn
Degree
Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.)
College
College of Arts and Humanities
Department
English
Degree Program
Creative Writing
Format
application/pdf
Identifier
CFE0004704
URL
http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/CFE0004704
Language
English
Release Date
May 2018
Length of Campus-only Access
5 years
Access Status
Masters Thesis (Open Access)
Subjects
Arts and Humanities -- Dissertations, Academic, Dissertations, Academic -- Arts and Humanities
STARS Citation
Kindle, Edith, "Pebbles And Shards" (2013). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 2965.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/etd/2965