The Simple Pains of Life

In Moral Disorder and Other Stories, Margaret Atwood weaves a series of separate, but also interconnected, tales using the simples pains of life in order to connect with her readers on a basic and powerful level. She tells stories focused on love, loss, parenthood, childhood, youth, old age, and relationships while focusing on the lives of her characters as they are in different places and positions in their lives; these stories subtly comment on how the ordinary problems and struggles of our everyday lives, though seemingly trivial, influence our actions, feelings, thoughts, and behaviors in extraordinary ways. Atwood shows her readers how difficult it is to be a child with a sibling suffering from colic and a chemical imbalance, to be a woman determined to fight against conformity and live life to the fullest, to be a woman loving and living with a still married man with children, and to watch ones own parents as they age and pass. Atwood jumps forwards and backwards in time in the lives of her characters and shows her audience how different we are in different stages of our lives and when we placed in different situations. Throughout our lives we grow and change, as does our beliefs and feelings about ourselves and the world. Moral Disorder and Other Stories gives us glimpses of the situations and feelings many of us struggle through in our lives that seem very basic but are challenging none the less; we handle these situations and move on with our lives, but it is how we handle and grow from the simple pains of life that makes us who we are.

My favorite tale was "The Headless Horseman," which was about a girl whose baby sister was born with a chemical imbalance. Throughout the main character's childhood, she was tasked with taking care of her anxious little sister in order to give her parents a break from her sobbing and mood swings. At they time they didn't know that her baby sister had a chemical imbalance, and they hoped that she would grow out of her anxiety and mood swings, as children often do. But she did not grow out of it and eventually was placed on the right medication and was able to become a stable, functioning person. The main character, had always felt like she might have contributed to her sisters instability, and had many times been scared for her because of her manic depressive tendencies; she had gone through life with her parents more concerned about her sister and her sister being allowed to do things that would be unacceptable for her to do because of her delicate condition. I liked this tale in particular because I think it exemplified the struggle many people face in dealing with a loved one who has unidentified psychiatric issues. It showed how difficult and sad it is to watch someone you love suffer inside of themselves in ways you cannot see or fix or even truly understand, and how painful it is to be living with and suffering through problems that no one seems to understand.

-Sam