The Burden Of A Happy Child Analysis

In this essay, “The Burden of a Happy Child,” by Mary Cantwell, that was published in The New York Times, the author goes into detail about her house when she was a child growing up. Cantwell loves this living space. She is so heartbroken when her parents sell the house even though she is already grown up and moved out. In the United States of America, “14.2% of people move from their house each year” (Avrick, n.d). There are many reasons as to why people like to change locations. Many want to try something new, others just want to get far away as possible from where they grew up. While the author is living somewhere else, she argues she cannot move on from her true home. So it shows there is a feeling of attachment possessed by the author. Cantwell, while making the title, puts a binary opposition within to make the reader think about the two opposites that appear.

Cantwell refers her childhood house as not only her home but her fortress …show more content…
The word burden can be taken as negative. Burden means, “a load, especially a heavy one” (Burden 2016). Everybody knows that the word happy is a good feeling word. So these two words cannot be together; the author thought otherwise. Anybody can see in the article there are a lot of feelings of change in the author’s life with having her father die in the house, her growing up and having to move out, and her mom selling the house she calls home; that is a load. So her going through ANALYSIS OF “THE BURDEN OF A HAPPY CHILDHOOD”

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all these events makes it hard for her to move on because of how happy her childhood was while she was living in the house. She says, “An unhappy childhood can cripple, but so can one as blessed as mine” (Cantwell, M. 1998, February 1). By saying this she is using a perfect representation of how the title was made. You can have the best childhood but still be crippled by all the joy when the memory is lost or sold