52 pages • 1 hour read
Liberation Day: Stories
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“Mother’s Day”Chapter Summaries & Analyses
“Mother’s Day” Summary
On Mother’s Day, Alma walks in her neighborhood with her adult children, Pammy and Paulie. In the first person, Alma thinks about her dissatisfaction with her children’s choices in life. She thinks about their childhood and their father, Paul Sr., who is dead. Alma remembers the romantic and sexual connection that Paul Sr. and she once shared, and she laments the loss of that connection when Paul Sr. had multiple affairs with women from the community. Alma also remembers their financial troubles and their worries about losing the house. The group sees a woman called Debi Hather outside her house, and Alma thinks about her hatred for Debi, whom she has known since high school.
The narrative shifts to Debi’s perspective as she sees the family walking down the road. Debi wonders when Alma will get her comeuppance for constantly being rude to Debi. She feels that Alma looks down on Debi for her untraditional life, which included multiple affairs with different men while Debi raised her daughter, Vicky. When she was 18, Vicky ran away from home, and Debi has not heard from her in three decades. Debi also thinks about her affair with Paul Sr., Alma’s husband, and reveals that she loved him. Debi waves at Alma down the street, but Alma ignores her.
The narrative shifts back to Alma and her children. A storm begins, then worsens; the wind and hail are intense, and Pammy tries to shield her elderly mother from the weather. Seeing their struggle, Debi retrieves an umbrella from her house, but Alma—who knows about Debi’s affair with her late husband—refuses to except Debi’s help. Debi returns to her house with the umbrella, shocked that Alma would refuse during such an intense storm. Then, Alma falls against a nearby fence, having difficulty breathing and feeling chest pain. From inside her home, Debi hears the ambulance arrive for Alma, and she sees that Alma has already died before she is taken to the hospital.
In a moment of consciousness before she dies, Alma thinks about her children and her late husband. In her vision, she apologizes to her baby children. The baby girl asks Alma who she truly wants to be, and Alma thinks back to her own childhood, before she was impacted by Paul and his infidelity. The paramedics say that Alma has died, and her daughter sobs against a tree.
"Mother's Day" Analysis
Alma's Mother's Day walk with her adult children serves as a backdrop for the hidden complexities of her past and her relationships, which she contemplates in her old age, while the violent hailstorm unravels her outward façade. As such, this story largely revolves around the theme of Outward Appearances Versus Reality and considers this idea in the context of another key theme, The Inevitability of Aging and Death.
On the surface, Alma’s Mother's Day walk is a simple, pleasant family outing; that is what Debi, the onlooking neighbor, sees when Alma’s family comes down the street. However, Alma's internal monologue reveals deep dissatisfaction with her children's life choices and her own failed marriage, which was marked by her husband’s infidelity. The disparity between the outward image of a family stroll and these internal struggles and resentments contributes to a dissonance between outward facades and the complex realities beneath the surface.
Further, Alma's hatred for Debi, a lifelong acquaintance, adds another dynamic to the complex series of outward appearances within the story. Debi's untraditional life and her affair with Paul Sr. expose the contrast between social expectations and her unconventional, personal choices. Alma's refusal to accept Debi's help during the storm, despite her physical weakness and her struggle in the harsh hail, illustrates how strongly hatred based on preconceived notions can cloud one’s judgments of another person.
Toward the end of the story, Saunders explores death’s inevitability. Alma's abrupt heart attack and subsequent death during the violent hailstorm highlight the inevitability of death as the weather ushers in an extreme reaction. It also highlights its unpredictability, since on a seemingly normal Mother’s Day Walk, Alma suddenly confronts the prospect of her own demise. In her final moments, Alma attempts to reconcile the struggles of her past by apologizing to her baby children and revisiting her pre-marital self. This vision expresses Alma’s yearning and nostalgia for her younger self before she became a mother and a wife. This detail underscores the inevitability of death, since Saunders relates every moment of Alma’s life to her final one, suggesting that her young life led to this moment and built up to her epiphany that she was not fulfilled by family life.
This element of the vision contributes to questions of gender within the story, because in Alma’s final moments, she dreams of a past self that was untouched by marriage and children, which brought difficult burdens to her life. This raises a comparison between her and Debi since Debi did not follow a conventional path. This clarifies that Alma resents Debi because of envy. This conveys a bleak outlook on womanhood: that those who follow a conventional path die miserable while those who don’t are ostracized. This introspective moment also captures the depth of Alma’s regret and the existential question of how to reconcile life regrets in the face of one’s own mortality.
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By George Saunders
