Memoir: Angela's Ashes

As I read chapter three of Frank Mcourt's memior, it stirred up several emotions. I couldn't read this piece objectively. I immediately retained this reading from a woman's  point of view and it pissed me off. I'm amazed how Frank was able to recall his childhood memories so clear and descriptively. I feel as though he re-lived every inch of those moments as he graced the paper. His poverty stricken life is way beyond anything I have seen or witnessed growing up in the hood, and yet he survived. This level of poverty he lived in and detailed is beyond words. That severe womanly sorrow his mother endured seemed to take on a hard core character of its own.  I can't imagine how Frank and his siblings felt about their mothers' emotional state and not knowing then how their father contributed to most of it.
My personal thoughts about what she endured I defined as abuse. Not abuse in the obvious way that most would see or define it as, but emotionally and financially Angela was dragged through the mud. Any woman would lose it, through the tragedies she endured, but she managed to muster up strength and kept her loyalty to her useless husband through it all. Her life is depressing and pitiful, and if her husband was a better man, perhaps he could have placed the family in a better position.
Frank's father is what I call a "prideful bumb". He lives in a world where keeping up appearances satisfies his pride, but on the reverse side if the coin, his pride covets his selfishness and ruins his familys' quality of life. His family is placed in embarrassing positions and ridiculed; in which the role of a man is to never leave his family open or placed in compromising positions. His alcoholism made me angry. His wife and children are helpless and victimized from his addiction. His wife's moments of optimism for the family is short lived anytime her husband lands a job. Angela can only pray that he would be considerate enough to come home with his wages knowing they are always in need. He has no sense of rationality, and he uses his pride as the "man code" of righteousness. In hypocrit land, he wanders aimlessly looking for only what he wants in his tiny little world and what he perceives his tiny little world should be.  How quickly do you forget that after a long days work, after having no money and living on a dole, that the money your family desperately needs doesn't make it home? Where does the conscious lie? With mouths to feed, what connection in his brain got severed along the way? With everything that is wrong he finds a way to make things worse.
Their house is next to a lavatory thats full of shit that leaves an unbearable stench. In comparison, Angela is married to a piece of shit. The shit that her husband pulls leaves them in a whole heap of shit called the stench of poverty. Angela could do bad all by herself.