Family Tree by Sara Salway

Opgave 6 A

1. Summary of  ”Family Tree ”

The short story ”Family Tree” is about two sisters (Susie and Annie) who are summoned by their father to come visit their sick mother. At the hospital a consultant explains their mother's heart condition through an analogy with a tree, whose spread branches are dying off because the oxygen can´t reach them. The father stays with the mother and the sisters are to come back in the morning.

The sisters spend the night in their old home and talk about their childhood. They decide to sleep in their parents´ bedroom. While in bed, they confess to each other that they both feel their family is split in two pairs – Them (the parents) and Us (the sisters). This still makes them look for a man, who can love them as much as their father loves their mother.

In the morning they find out that their mother is better and is recovering.

Words: 150

1. Analytical essay about “Family Tree”

 The title of Sarah Salway´s  short story “Family Tree” suggests  a warm topic and a leisure reading about an ordinary subject with a predictable course of events.

But stepping forward into the story one finds itself in a somewhat unusual setting, stranded in a family split into two pairs: the parents and the children.

The children are two middle aged sisters, Susie and Annie – the main character, who arrive in their hometown to be together with their mother, who is suffering from a heart condition and supposedly dying. There are three years difference in their age but they look so much alike, they always have done. The alikeness in their looks asides with the alikeness in their feelings towards their parents, of whom they thought that were always MumandDad, like one person instead of two. This is seen in the way their father talks to them in their mother´s name: he’s always spoken for her, started everything with ‘your mum thinks...’.

The father, whom after the first moments of panic seeing his daughters at the hospital were over, would subside to his need of having their mother all to himself and send them at their childhood home to rest for the night. And here is the split, the wall that separates the parents from the children. The parents are wrapped around in their love for each other creating a bubble where isn't place for anyone else, leaving the children outside it, unwanted.

The sisters´ first memory of their childhood when reentering the parents´ bedroom was that, their mother never let them sleep into her bed: “Other children got to sleep whole nights with their parents but she always told us to go back to our own beds.”

The side affects, of the poor relationship with the parents, were to surface later on in the confessions the sisters make to each other. Annie admits that, when she was little she wished her father dead so her mother could love her more. And both of them realize that all this time they've been searching for someone like their Dad to love them and truly want them.

Sadder still is the fact that the parents´ alienation did not bring the sisters together, as they put it “... it was never Us, was it? It was always you and me separately. So it was Them and me and it was Them and you.”, and they have always felt that they did´t have anyone, that they were alone. Annie´s long years of bitterness take shape in her harsh words that, her parents should have never had children; Susie mirrors her feelings.