Relationships And Change In Estrella Alfon's May

Many say that everything we are and become starts at home. It is such that when we go through changes, the ones seen and the ones felt, the first to suffer the consequences of these changes are the people at home and our relationships with them. In Estrella Alfon’s May, the interaction of the narrator with both her mother and her father allows the narrative to move under the themes of differences, relationships and changes.

The story is told in the first person point of view and revolves at a very domestic setting, that is it focuses on the story of a father, a mother and their child, and is also set during the birth month of the narrator. These premises give the reader a certain kind of intimacy with the story which is apt considering what …show more content…
For the greater part of the story, the mother was the narrator’s rival. She was the person who read her love letters, the person who contradicted her dress choices, who forbade the boy she liked to come visit her on her birthday. Her mother will always be the person “who knew I liked him and therefore thoroughly disliked him” and the person her suitors had to dare face to court her. In a way, her mother was her guard dog, always keeping a close eye on her. Her father, on the other hand, was the strong rock that she can depend on. He was the man who praised her singing, who loved it despite the fact that she was out of tune. He was the one who gave her her first important piece of jewelry, the one who smiled and reassured her that she will forgive, the father who “laughed at my woe”. The narrator even reminded herself “how good my father was, how good to …show more content…
How the mother, like her white crocheted sheets, has become the fragile one and the father, true to the black cross, has caused the women in his life to weep in sorrow. At this point when the narrator has left her innocence, suggested by the manol or sampaguita vines covering her bedroom window, and enters adolescence, the general impression of her relationship with each parent and their character has slowly disintegrated and has turned into something else. It seems as if along with the personal change she is going through, the rapport she has with each parent is also going through changes. She begins to grasp where her mother’s ways are coming from. When berating the boy who sang to her in the moonlight that one May night did not matter anymore, she learns to forgive her mother “for acting always the way she did with whomever she imagined I loved.” Gone were the days of their conflict and this time, “with her, I had picked up what she thought were evidences of culpability”. She stopped crying because of what she sees as her mother’s intrusions in her life and instead she now becomes her mother’s consoler when she“held my mother’s sob-wracked shoulders”. It seems as if she and her mother has come to a point where their relationship is like the breakfast her mother had prepared for her that one Sunday when breakfast came