Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Essays about family dynamics
Family dynamics and their effects
Family dynamics and their effects
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Essays about family dynamics
It is commonly found that as someone matures they begin to appreciate their loved ones increasingly. In his poem Those Winter Sundays, Robert Hayden describes the sacrifices a father makes for his family, and the lack of appreciation the speaker shows for him. It is learned early in the poem that the father works a labor-intensive job during the week that is hard on his body. Despite his hurting hands and presumably exhausted body, he wakes up on his day of rest, Sunday, to warm up the house and be a desirable father. While the father seems to be performing his paternal duties perfectly on the surface, it is presented to the reader that the household is not always as warm. It is clear that the bond between the speaker and his father is not a strong one and when the speaker matured, he began to regret how weak the relationship was. This may be because “a father is a primary role model, helping his son learn what it means to be a man.” (Our Everyday Life) The father makes a true effort to make the household a comfortable one but the reasoning behind his efforts are not as obvious. “Slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house,” It can be interpreted that the reason the father is seemingly overcompensating is because he feels guilty for the way he …show more content…
The father feels remorseful knowing that he leads an uncomfortable household, so he does what he can to make up for it by warming up the cold house, cleaning shoes, and so on. The reason the house is so uneasy isn’t directly expressed to the reader but one can assume it may have to do with the attitudes within the house or even the father’s career. If the father is working long hours during the week, he may not be home often enough to really bond with his children. This could be another reason the writer makes it so that the reader can feel the tension and awkwardness throughout the
She brings light to an issue that divided her family from her father, his “obsession” with fixing up the house. She states, "I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture" (14). She believes her father was detached, living his life through restoring old furniture and fixing up the family home, leaving little attention for the family that lived there. She was suspicious of her father’s décor saying, “they were lies” (14). This left much to be desired, often leading her to question whether her father even liked having a family. This feeling is expressed when she says, "Sometimes, when things were going well, I think my father actually enjoyed having a family. Or at least, the air of authenticity we lent to his exhibit. A sort of still life with children" (13). He occupied his life with fixing up his home almost as if he was trying to cover up the problems going on inside himself. Bechdel suggests that the antique mirrors decorating the home were meant to distract visitors from his personal shame. She says, "His shame inhabited our house as pervasively and invisibly as the aromatic musk of aging mahogany" (20). She states that this shame stemmed from her father’s closeted sexual preferences. This would later connect them in a very powerful
“Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden, “My Father as a Guitar” by Martin Espada, and “Digging” by Seamus Heaney are three poems that look into the past of the authors and dig up memories of the authors fathers. The poems contain similar conflicts, settings, and themes that are essential in helping the reader understand the heartfelt feelings the authors have for their fathers. With the authors of the three poems all living the gust of their life in the 1900’s, their biographical will be similar and easier to connect with each other.
The events of our childhood and interactions with our parents is an outline of our views as parents ourselves. Although Robert Hayden’s relationship with his father differentiates from the relationship of Theodore Roethke and his father, they are both pondering back to their childhood and expressing the events in a poem. “My Papa’s Waltz” and “Those winter Sundays” provide the reader with an image of a childhood event which states how fathers are being viewed by their children. These poems reflect upon the relationship of the father and child when the child was a youth. Both Roethke and Hayden both indicate that their fathers weren’t perfect although they look back admiringly at their fathers’ actions. To most individuals, a father is a man that spends time with and takes care of them which gains him love and respect. An episode of Roethke’s childhood is illustrated in “My Papa’s Waltz”. In “My Papa’s Waltz”, the father comes home showing signs of alcohol and then begins waltzing with his son. Roethke states that the father’s hands are “battered on one knuckle”. The mother was so upset about the dancing that she did nothing other than frown. At the end of the day, the father waltzed the son to bed. “Those Winter Sundays” is based on a regular Sunday morning. The father rises early to wake his family and warm the house. To warm the house, he goes out in the cold and splits wood to start a fire. This is a poem about an older boy looking back to his childhood and regretting that “No one ever thanked him.” In Those Winter Sundays'; by Robert Hayden, the poet also relinquishes on a regular occurrence in his childhood. On Sunday mornings, just as any other morning, his father rises early and puts on his clothes in the cold darkness. He ...
If I were asked who the most precious people in my life are, I would undoubtedly answer: my family. They were the people whom I could lean on to matter what happens. Nonetheless, after overhearing my mother demanded a divorce, I could not love her as much as how I loved her once because she had crushed my belief on how perfect life was when I had a family. I felt as if she did not love me anymore. Poets like Philip Levine and Robert Hayden understand this feeling and depict it in their poems “What Work Is” and “Those Winter Sundays.” These poems convey how it feels like to not feel love from the family that should have loved us more than anything in the world. Yet, they also convey the reconciliation that these family members finally reach because the speakers can eventually see love, the fundamental component of every family in the world, which is always presence, indeed. Just like I finally comprehended the reason behind my mother’s decision was to protect me from living in poverty after my father lost his job.
After a decade of not seeing his mother and brother, Howard returns to his hometown in Mississippi. It is evident how thrilled he is. As the train approaches town, he begins “to feel curious little movements of the heart, like a lover as he nears his sweetheart” (par. 3). He expects this visit to be a marvelous and welcoming homecoming. His career and travel have kept his schedule extremely full, causing him to previously postpone this trip to visit his family. Although he does not immediately recognize his behavior in the past ten years as neglectful, there are many factors that make him aware of it. For instance, Mrs. McLane, Howard’s mother, has aged tremendously since he last saw her. She has “grown unable to write” (par. 72). Her declining health condition is an indicator of Howard’s inattentiveness to his family; he has not been present to see her become ill. His neglect strikes him harder when he sees “a gray –haired woman” that showed “sorrow, resignation, and a sort of dumb despair in her attitude” (par. 91). Clearly, she is growing old, and Howard feels guilty for not attending her needs for such a long time period: “his throat [aches] with remorse and pity” (par. 439). He has been too occupied with his “excited and pleasurable life” that he has “neglected her” (par. 92). Another indication of Howard’s neglect is the fact that his family no longer owns the farm and house where he grew up. They now reside in a poorly conditioned home:
In his essay, the mother gets tired of the siblings after five snow days and shows her frustration by yelling at the children to, “Get the hell out of my house.” (Sedaris qtd. Faigley 89) When the mother did not have that time to relax and enjoy herself, it resulted in her kicking out her children and not letting them back in the house the whole day. The reader’s father had several characteristics as Sedaris mother did. Instead of his mother drinking at home,
"Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden is a poem about a how the author is recalling how his father would wake up early on Sundays, a day which is usually a reserved as a day of rest by many, to fix a fire for his family. The mood of this poem is a bit sad. It portrays a father, who deeply cares for his family but doesn't seem to show it by emotions, words, or touching. It also describes a home that isn't very warm in feelings as well as the title" Those Winter Sundays" The author describes the father as being a hard worker, in the line "…with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday…", but still even on Sundays--the day of rest, the father works at home to make sure the house is warm for his family. The "blueblack cold described in the poem is now warmed by a father's love. This poem describes the author reminiscing what did not seem obvious at the time, the great love of his father, and the author's regretting to thank his father for all that he did.
The lack of verbal communication between his father and himself can be seen in his poem "Those Winter Sundays." The overall impression of the poem is that love can be communicated in other ways than through words; it can be communicated through everyday, mundane actions. For example, in the poem, the father awakens on "Sundays too" to warm the house with a fire and polish his sons shoes. There is a sense of coldness in the beginning of the poem through the lines:
Since the story uses a certain object, the Jacket, as the meaning of several issues, it primarily focuses on the narrator's poverty-stricken family. First of all, an example of the poverty is demonstrated when the narrator complains that the jacket "was so ugly and big that I knew I'd have to wear it a long time"(paragraph 3). It is clear that his lack of money was a problem in which he would have to keep the jacket because he could not afford a new one. The narrator then feels embarrassed and upset by the jacket by stating "I blame my mother for her bad taste and cheap ways"(paragraph 10). By mentioning his mother's "cheap" ways he is conveying that he is aggravated because of his mothers option to choose bad and ugly clothes in ord...
In the short story The Father by Hugh Garner there is boy who’s father is not involved in his life. This is mostly because he is always drunk. Because of this Johnny, the father’s son, has not really been able to connect with his father. He is never there for Johnny when he needs him and is always embarrassing him. This made me really sad as I cannot imagine living without a loving father. I do not think that anyone should have to live without the care of their father. I can only imagine how sad that Johnny must have felt to not have a good father in his life. It must have been very hard for Johnny to see all of the other scout and their father’s at the banquet, knowing that he would never have a good father-son relationship with his dad. The fact that he did not feel comfortable asking his dad to come to the scouts banquet himself,
The central conflict in Robert Hayden’s poem “Those Winter Sundays”, is the unfortunate realization that the speaker never truly thanked or appreciated his father’s sacrifices when he was a child. After growing up, taking on responsibilities, and achieving a rehabilitated understanding of the world through experience, Hayden expresses his ingratitude that often accompanies with youth. The first line of the first stanza writes, “Sundays too my father got up early/and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold” (Hayden, 17). Out of these two lines, the word “too” is filled with importance because Sunday’s are dedicated to either religious practices, or rest for a working man. Fortunately, this was not his father’s case as his father would wake up early in order to perform his loving and self-sacrificing duties.
Robert Hayden’s poem, “Those Winter Sundays,” addresses how hard work and love go unnoticed and unappreciated. Hayden uses visual and auditory imagery to convey that the father worked had for nothing in return and “no one ever thanked him.” The son understands the great measures that the father goes for his son and questions his own knowledge of the work as he sits and “the rooms were warm.” The speaker mentions how his father, even on Sundays, woke up early to leave in the “blueblack cold… with cracked hands that ached” and the father still made the time to “polish my [the speaker] good shoes as well.” Hayden portrays the image of the cold and the appearance of the hands to construct the love that the father shares for his son without the
While most of us think back to memories of our childhood and our relationships with our parents, we all have what he would call defining moments in our views of motherhood or fatherhood. It is clearly evident that both Theodore Roethke and Robert Hayden have much to say about the roles of fathers in their two poems as well. While the relationships with their fathers differ somewhat, both men are thinking back to a defining moment in their childhood and remembering it with a poem. "My Papa's Waltz" and "Those Winter Sundays" both give the reader a snapshot view of one defining moment in their childhood, and these moments speak about the way these children view their fathers. Told now years later, they understand even more about these moments.
One example from the passage “Parents may openly lament their lack of sleep, hectic schedules and difficulty in dealing with their surly teens, but rarely will they cop to feeling depressed due to the everyday rigors of child rearing.” In other words, parents will be wake all night if the child is sick, parents have to wake up early to take them to school, they will take off from work if they have to take them to the doctor. To be a parents is not fun, all the free time parents will have they have to spend it with their kids. Parents always worried about how to keep their children happy and healthy. Children are expensive this days and parents had to work hard to support
A father is someone who protects, loves, supports and raises his children, whether they are biologically related or not. Every single person living on the Earth has a biological father. These biological fathers are supposed to take the responsibility of being a father because they did help bring a child into this world. One of the main responsibilities of a father is providing the child with the necessities of life, which include food, shelter, and clothes. Not only is a father responsible for the physical aspect but the emotional aspect as well. Children need to feel loved, cared for, and emotional support from their parents. A child needs to be reassured, so a father must show his affection, both physically and emotionally. A father needs to be involved in his children’s life. He needs to be a problem solver, playmate, provider, preparer, and he has to have principles. A father has to pr...