Stacey's inner-monologues, which make up a majority of the narrative, illustrate how cut off she has become from intimate and meaningful relationships with those around her. Unable to speak in more than superficial terms with her husband, Mac, and facing a distant relationship with her sons and eldest daughter, Stacey only truly reveals herself through conversations with two-year-old Jen, who is non-verbal and thus unlikely to either interrupt or challenge her mother's rantings. Left with no one to talk to, Stacey has no choice but to retreat into memory and fantasy and her conversations with the God she is no longer certain that she believes in.

The cumulative effect of her isolation is that Stacey no longer recognizes herself. She is certainly not the vibrant teenager that she distantly remembers, nor is she the patient example of motherhood that she sees on television or in the lives of other women that she briefly encounters....

While she doesn't rail against her role as mother, recognizing that it is a "worthwhile job to bring up four kids" (84) neither does she find fulfilment in this role, instead feeling like she's "spending [her] life in one unbroken series of trivialities" (84). The children are their own people and do not need her in the all-encompassing way that television shows and earlier generations have led Stacey to believe, and her husband's emotional distance marks him as essentially absent from her life. Thus, she is presented with a life in which she has no identity other than as a wife and mother, a position which forces her to confront the duality of motherhood in order to achieve a sense of self which will allow her to withstand the pressures of her mundane life while realizing that she will never again be an unencumbered eighteen-year-old girl.
Works Cited

Laurence, Margaret. The Fire Dwellers. Toronto: New Canadian…