Response to Emily Feagin's "With Sweat Stripes Across Our Bellies"

Emily Feagin’s “With Sweat Stripes Across Our Bellies” is about the relationship between the narrator and her mother, who has dementia. The story is mainly a compilation of the narrator’s memories and experiences with her mother which is interwoven with a scene of dialogue in which the mother, in the grips of dementia, cannot remember taking her pills. This group of memories helps the narrator come to grips with her mother’s dementia as the disease slowly takes away the woman she once knew.

Overall, I enjoyed this story. It was sad, but that is mainly because the narration captures the relationship between the mother and daughter well, so it is sad to see how the mother, whom the daughter obviously loves very much, is decaying and becoming but a memory of the person she once was. Also, I really liked the ongoing scene/conversation about the pills. It perfectly showed the effects of dementia, thus exposing the reader to what dementia has done to the mother, all while tying the entire story together.

Though the scene about the pills is very good, personally, I would like to see more scene throughout the entire story. As it stand right now, the narration consists mainly of summary, making the story mainly a compilation of summaries of memories. Obviously, not all the memories need to be in scene, but I think it might work if one or two of the more important/impactful memories were written in scene. I would like to see how the mother was before the dementia set in. Right now, all I know about the mother is from what the narrator tells me and how the mother acts with dementia.

Also, I had a hard time nailing down exactly what the story was about. Personally, I felt like it was about the relationship between the mother and daughter more than it was about dementia or anything else. That being said, I’m not really sure how exactly the narrator changes. From the beginning, she is a loving daughter, and at the end, she is still a loving daughter. I guess the change is that she has come to accept this new person that has become her mother. But I’m not really sure. I would like to see more development of the narrator’s character in order to clear that up.