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Why did their mother abandon them at the mall?

posted 12 years ago by jughead10m
2 replies | jump to latest

This doesn't make sense. She pulls the kids out of the house in the middle of the night and takes them to have an Aunt in Bridgeport look after them. She stops at the mall & leaves Dicey & the kids in the station wagon, takes the car keys & boom just disappears after a few hours. She loved all four of them very much so why why why did she abandon them?

Dicey could have after two hours in the car, gone to a policeman in the mall & told them that their Mom abandoned them & he would have helped them. True he would have brought them to Social Services, but however, Dicey could have begged & pleaded with Social Services not to have the four of them siblings separated & I am sure there would have been a foster parent or two that would have taken 4 of them and got them adopted.

Plus that man from Yale that bought them a meal & gave Dicey some money, could have taken them somewhere in New Haven, find a foster home there that would have been happy to have 4 children.

Plus if the cousin said she didn't want them, they could have again contacted that man from Yale & he would have helped them more but why did they pick going to Maryland to see a grandmother that didn't want them in the first place, why?

Plus again what reason would she have to abandon them if she loved them?

[–] fiatlux-1 12 years ago

The mom was severely mentally ill. She had been almost since birth. This film doesn't touch on it hardly at all, while the book tells it in detail.
Dicey describes it as their Momma was deteriorating, was becoming 'lost'.
She would go to the store for bread, and come back with only a can of tuna. She'd leave the house and be gone for hours, and when asked where she'd been her face would be blank. As if she couldn't remember. The mom then stopped singing to them, talking to them (except Sammy sometimes) and never really interacted with them again.
Dicey then says she thinks that Momma knew she was crumbling, and tried to get them to Aunt Cilla's before she crumbled away. But she had a further breakdown of some kind, and left them at the mall. Then, as we see she breaks down completely and becomes catatonic.

I thought Dicey was kind of foolish in what she did, but more in the way she did it. In the book, she almost has enough money to buy bus tickets to Aunt Cilla's but unthinkingly buys them all a fast food meal instead.
I would have tried panhandling or something, or at least tried to get the police to take them to Aunt Cilla's!

But I will say Dicey is 100% correct in assuming that the worst could happen.
2 of my relatives work indirectly around this, and they said that the system can absolutely refuse to do anything you ask and split your family up in 3 seconds. They'd seen their superiors do just this.
Foster families frequently do not want several children at once, even siblings.
So the threat of separation was a real one.

I don't think the help from the Yale student was a long term kind of help. The man, while kind, had his own life and was young. I don't think he'd have been willing to handle 4 kids for the rest of their lives. Dicey needed to find out about her own relatives, and see what would happen there.

"I'd say this cloud is Cumulo Nimbus."
"Didn't he discover America?"
"Penfold, shush."

[–] ambersky 11 years ago

The book is more detailed.

In the book Dicey knew that the mother had signs of mental illness. James and Dicey had wondered about it being hereditary, that maybe one of them could be like that especially Maybeth.

This was written in 1981 and supposedly took place in the early to mid 70s.
There were a lot of families that were split up and placed in different homes. Back then kids were pretty much ignored, Dicey could have argued all she wanted to they would probably have blown her off.

In the book the college student(s) were not as friendly as the movie made them out to be. Oh they helped them out but Windy did not even see them off in the book. His roommate did and he did not even wait for them to go up to the door. He left and that was that. They did not give them their contact information.

In the book they stayed with the cousin for quite a while. The cousin had been considering going to enter the sisterhood. She gave it up though so that she could take care of the children BUT her heart was with becoming a nun and she was quite sad. Sammy, Maybeth & James were in summer programs, while Dicey was expected to take care of all the household stuff. They people that ran the church wanted to have Maybeth taken and put into a program or state hospital for mentally disabled, plus they wanted Sammy to be taken and placed elsewhere because he was fighting and getting into trouble.

They did not know their grandmother even existed and they wanted to see her for themselves.

The mother loved them, she knew that she was losing her battle with her mental illness. This is why she got them all together to take them to the Aunt's but she snapped before she got there.

Personally I wish they had actually had Claire and Will from the book in the movie as they helped way more than the college students.

When they left the aunt's they did not go straight to the grandmothers.

I just finished reading this book tonight as I wanted to read it after watching the movie because like you some of it made no sense. When I was reading it I knew this book had to take place some time ago.

If you don't have much to begin with, then you don't have much to lose.