Breaking The Cycle

Something I noticed while reading "Everything Is Flammable" by Gabrielle Bell was that Bell's depiction of her mother, Maggie, evolves throughout the book to show us more of her character. The first thing we understand about Maggie, as shown on page 14, is that she needs a new phone, her car is broken down, and that she has a garden (something Bell has in common with her). Nothing too big or too bad.

Then on page 16 we learn that Maggie's house burnt down, thus sending Bell into a panic as she tries to call everyone her mother knows in order to find out where she went. It's not until page 27 that we get to see her, and initially, she seems fine. She's quieter than the others she's with, and it's not until page 53 that she starts getting described as and shown as needing Bell's help more than we were shown before. Here, Maggie is described as "a mermaid in a ship's cabin, she preferred it sunk in the very element it was meant to exclude."

There's a moment on page 57 when we see the role reversal, where Bell does a parent thing for her mother. She ties her shoes for her. And then a few pages later, she's shown trying to calm Maggie down when she starts to call herself stupid for trying to get back to the office by herself. Maggie has many moments like these, where she needs Bell's reassurance.

Bell shows all of these things coming to a head towards the end of the book, however, in the moment that Maggie admits to Bell that if she could've had an abortion, she would have. Bell shows us that as this moment, on page 114, she initially didn't react to the news, and later came to the full realization while seeing her therapist. From then on, Maggie is only pictured one more time, even though Bell returns to California to see her again.

The scene that really sticks out to me when it concerns Bell and Maggie's reversed roles is the one on page 122 when Bell is talking with her grandmother. Here, we learn that there's been a cycle passed from mother to daughter of the mother's not being able to take care of her children. Bell decides here that this wheel of reversed care taking will end with her. She will have no children, and thus break the cycle.