Push

Getting through this book took more sittings then I thought it would. It was technically a "quick read" but it was rough to get through. Every time I thought something wonderful was going to happen for Precious a memory from her childhood would come up. It just kept hitting me that there really was no escape for her from everything that had happened to her. She was going to always be reminded. I can only wonder how difficult it was for her to see her children and be a mother to them knowing that they were the product of rape. She mentions it a few times but she never dwells on it when it comes to Abdul. She truly wants Abdul to have a life that was nothing like hers. Its as though she doesn't want to think about Abdul as the product of rape so she can make sure to provide everything to him that she wasn't. If she could only remember the rape then I don't think she would have been able to be as a good a mother to him as she was.



That's another thing that gets to me. She tries to hard to be separated from the fact that she was raped and sexually abused by both parents and then at the same time she uses it as what defines who she has become. It's the idea of duality at the same time. She hurts and refuses to hurt. Its this that helps her to work hard to become someone else and not suffer the same fate of her mother and father. Precious wants so much to live a life that will be so completely different from the life she had previously lived.



What I don't get however is how when she is finally given a tool to help her sort through her emotional problems she immediately pushes it away. She is so sceptical of the counselor Ms. Weiss. She believes the only reason she is being helped is so the government can take her off of welfare and support. Granted this may have been part of the reason a counselor was supplied to her, but it could have been an opportunity for Precious to begin to openly discuss what had happened to her. She had already made the huge step in writing about what had happened to her in her journal. The counselor even asked her if she wanted to read aloud from her journal in order to easier discuss what had happened to her as a child.

The counselor was a bit of a idiot to not recognize that Precious's mother was also part of the sexual abuse that she had experienced as a child. Precious was so against wanting to have any interaction with her mother at that point. I do agree with how the counselor went about confronting Precious's mother with what happened, but it doesn't seem as though she gave Precious any tools that would help her deal with what she was hearing. Precious needed help in order to sort through what she had gone through and the counselor was only telling her to talk and write about it. She didn't at any point try to teach Precious to recognize that what had happened to her was not right,

No one at any point of the book made an attempt to help Precious realize that the color of your skin did not make you any better than anyone else. She was being helped in every other department but no one wanted to help her with her self confidence. Rather they influenced her to be angry about her position as a poor black woman. Everything was about her needing to be white and skinny. This truly bothered me. I know that there is a disperity between the poor black and white percentage, but the way she was being instructed about race was not conducive to her feeling as though she can succeed. Everything was about how the white man was trying to take everything away from her and that she needed to be white to be pretty and successful. This just bothers me so much.

There is so much more to say and at the moment I just can't put it into words... I am going to let the book sink in a bit more and write more later.