Toxic Masculinity Theme Analysis

A kid is a terrible thing to be, in charge of nothing. If you get past that and grown, it’s easiest to forget about the misery and pretend you knew all along what you were doing. Assuming you’ve ended up someplace you’re proud to be. And if not, easier to forget the whole thing, period. So this is going to be option three, not proud, not forgetting. Not easy.

Mom had walked down the road and Stoner was bent over kissing her like he was trying to suck something out of her guts with a straw. And her a willing party to the crime.

For whatever reason Emmy said okay, let’s do it. I had to hold her hand. She kept her eyes closed.

It was true about Aunt June keeping track. Which was not true of my mom in any way, shape, or form. So that was me promising Emmy that life is to be trusted. I knew better. I should have let her go with her gut: Never get back on the horse, because it’s going to throw you every damn chance it gets. Then maybe she’d have been wise to the shit that came for her later on, and maybe it would have turned out better.

Nobody believed a word out of this girl’s mouth at the time of her need. And today, her side of the story stands as gospel. The world turns […]. How all this fits with the story of me, hard to say.

Maybe life, or destiny, or Jesus if you really need to put somebody in charge of things had finally flung down one too many rocks in Mom’s road and she called it a day. That’s option one. Or two, maybe she didn’t aim to die but miscalculated to cap off her twenty-nine-year pileup of miscalculations, one of those of course being me. I could spend the rest of my life asking which it was, suicide or accident. No answer on that line.

In the long run, that’s how I’ve come to picture Mom at the end: reaching as hard as her little body would stretch, trying to touch the blue sky, reaching for some peace. And getting it.

Mom was the unknown soldier. Walmart would have a new stock girl in time for the Christmas shoppers […]. Our trailer home would be thoroughly Cloroxed and every carpet torn out, so the Peggots could rent it to one of Aunt June’s high school friends that got left flat by both her kids’ daddies […]. Wanting a fresh start for this girl and her little family, I’m sure they scrubbed the place clean of old stains, including the two pencil lines on the kitchen wall that proved I once stood taller by a hair than my mom. Her life left no marks on a thing.

I told Angus my mom being dead wasn’t something I pinned exactly on my birthday. “It’s more like this bag of gravel I’m hauling around every day of the year. If somebody else brings it up, honestly, I’m glad of it. Like just for a minute they can help me drag the gravel.”

Where does the road to ruin start? That’s the point of getting all this down, I’m told. To get a handle on some choice you made. Or was made for you. By the bullies that curdled your heart’s milk and honey, or the ones before that curdled theirs. Hell, let’s blame the coal guys, or whoever wrote the book of Lee County commandments. Thou shalt forsake all things you might love or study on, books, numbers, a boy’s life made livable in pictures he drew. Leave these ye redneck faithful, to chase the one star left shining on this place: manly bloodthirst. The smell of mauled sod and sweat and pent-up lust and popcorn. The Friday-night lights.