The Years of My Birth By Louise Erdrich - Essay Example

At that time she was too young to be even admitted to a state run institution. Tuffy and her brother referred to as the doppelganger shared a very ethereal and unique relationship. Tuffy’s birth circumstances, her deformities and the fact the she was left stranded in the nursing home was an effect of her brother’s presence. After Mrs. Lasher’s, the mother’s delivery of the twins, Tuffy never saw any of them ever again. It was only during her mid-adulthood that she chanced upon when a phone call came to her residence.

Tuffy never saw her brother, her doppelganger, and was not aware of his looks, his name, his whereabouts, or any information related to his brother whatsoever. Quite frequently she used to feel the presence of a comforting soul, a sympathetic hand, and a warm presence of an invisible person around her, beside her. She used to have the same feeling when taking ling walks, as if someone was accompanying her just beyond the corner of her eye. She felt this for years, right from the time she was abandoned till her years of womanhood.

While Tuffy was still a child growing up at the Wishkob household, amidst the love, care and affection of the Wishkob couple: Betty and Albert, she began to have a growing attachment towards them and their children, Sheryl and Cedric. She didn’t hold her birth mother or her bother in high regard, rather she was indifferent to their whereabouts, and didn’t want to go to them. Her relationship with her doppelganger in the beginning was quite different. She bore agony and resentment in her heart for the inhuman treatment that was metted out to her during her birth.

The incident has such a deep engraving in her mind that she bore a feeling of indifference toward the Lasher family. She remembered her birth mother Nancy Lasher with a lot of pain and discontent in her heart. All her life she tried avoiding pain and the prime cause of a raw and aching nerve inside her was her own birth family. Such being the case, she didn’t care and even though she worked in the reservation post office, she didn’t bother, for years, to get the address of her birth mother and contact her.

It was only on the night when Tuffy (Linda Wishkob) was contacted by her birth mother, under extraordinary circumstances and quite unannounced that the trail of her life and her feelings took a turn. After Tuffy was abandoned by her parents in the local nursery and she started growing up with the Wishkobs there were times when she was taken away from Betty and Albert by welfare officers with the duty to find a better home for her. During on such incident when she was driven off to an unknown place by the visiting welfare officer, and found herself waking up in a white room, she felt the presence of someone.

She felt as if someone was with her, comforting her, holding her hand, crying and grieving with her. She never had this experience before, but thereafter continued to experience it on several occasions throughout her life under varying circumstances. She had a strange and peculiar feeling in her heart as if someone was around her and was in dire need of help. It was as if a person was holding on to life and depending on Tuffy’