Many children take their mothers for granted, and many mothers never bother to make an effort to change this mindset in their children. Svava Jakobsdóttir’s short story “A Story for Children” is a satirical example of this societal ideology. In “A Story for Children,” a mother loses her brain to her children’s curiosity and desire to “see what a person’s brain looks like,” and then has her heart removed when her children leave the house and stop talking to her (Jakobsdóttir 383). The mother in this story is brutalized by her many children and neglected by her emotionally distant husband, provoking her to turn to the monotony of daily routine – thus the loss of her brain in the beginning of the story – so she can avoid thinking too deeply about what her life has turned into, despite the fact that she herself did cause it a little since she never managed to learn to deny her children whatever they wished.
The brain in this story represents the mother’s ability to think and do things for herself rather than solely focusing on her children. In the very beginning, Jakobsdóttir writes about how the mother kept a women’s magazine on the kitchen bench to “[sneak] a look it whenever she got a chance”, but even then she feels guilty about …show more content…
However, this wasn’t necessarily a good thing. The mother comes to a fair amount of harm throughout the course of the story, and even before it begins. For example, aside from sawing a part of her skull off and removing her brain, the children cut off one of her toes, their excuse being that they wanted to know “what happened if someone had only nine toes” (Jakobsdóttir 382). When her eldest son leaves the house to start a life of his own, he steps on her while crossing the threshold of the house (Jakobsdóttir 384). Her youngest son also stabbed her in the arm to get her attention (Jakobsdóttir