Miles City Montana Summary

The main character is a twenty-six years old mother of two daughters: Cynthia who is six years old and Meg who is three and a half years old; she has a loving husband named Andrew who loves her despite her selfish and untrustworthy flaws. As the story is told from the first person point of view from the main character herself, we get to receive a deeper insight on her life and how she has dealt with issues in the past which have shaped her present day actions. The major idea of the story revolves around the relationship of parents and their children. The theme of the short story Miles City, Montana is the impact that parent’s choices have on their children and how they form the basis of the child’s understanding on later becoming a parent. …show more content…
She describes herself as “it was being a watcher that did it. A watcher, not a keeper”(page 66). By stating this in the beginning of the story, she hints to the idea that when confronted with an obstacle, she waits for it to go away or hopes someone else would take action. She remains almost in a different zone and when she states she is not a keeper, she foreshadows the near death drowning incident which is to come with her daughter Meg. By not being a “keeper,” she shows her lack of responsibility as being a mother. This is shown when despite having the impulse to jump into the pool and save her daughter she awaits her husband or the lifeguard to do so, “I cried out for Andrew, and the lifeguard came into the view” (page 72). The main character was the first adult and closest to her drowning daughter so she should have jumped into the water to save her daughter right away. Instead, she begins to question the actions of the lifeguard who was trying to rescue Meg, “why would a lifeguard stop and point, why would she ask what that was, why didn’t she just dive into the water and swim to it?”(page 72). If Meg were to unfortunately drown while her older sister Cynthia and mother stood at the other end of the pool simply watching, Cynthia would grow up to have a similar feeling of disgust to her mother when she witnessed the tragic death of Steve …show more content…
After being a parent and first hand witnessing the near death experience of her daughter, she realizes that in that moment she was a naive and had a childish instinct of putting her parents to blame for the death of her friend as parents are always responsible for giving life to their children and thus have to be proactive to their children’s safety. Following the incident with her daughter, the main character experiences a new perspective on being a parent. All her life she had a slight feeling of anger towards her parents as they were responsible for looking after Steve as he did not have any family and his father was a drunk. Through Meg’s near death experience, she realizes that parents never want to hurt their children and always pray for their child’s safety yet they are human and can make mistakes like anyone else. There may be a time when they are not in full attention of their child and that is when an accident occurs. Despite the mother being a watcher by nature, she acts on her impulse and runs to look for