Themes and message
The main themes of the short story “The Weekly Visit” by Emanuel Melo are:
- Selfishness
- Duty
- The defective communication between parents and children
Selfishness
In the short story, both Jake and his mother believe that the other one is selfish. First of all, Jake believes that his mother would consider him selfish when he would gather the courage to tell her that he wants to stop the weekly visits:
“She won’t understand why he is no longer able to devote so much time to her—the shopping and the errands and the cleaning and the banking and the doctors’ appointments, all the things that his father would have done for her. But he is not his father nor does he want to be his father’s substitute.” (ll. 40-43)
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Duty
The society in which we live in has some rules according to which a parent has a duty towards the child until a certain age, and that the child has a duty toward the parent from then on. Still, it is rarely the case when people think that the rules should be seen the other way around.
First, a parent’s duty means feeding the child, caring for him, providing education and the necessary knowledge and attention until the child becomes an adult and can provide for himself.
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Defective communication
The entire short story depicts the way in which a defective communication can come to affect a mother and a son up to the point of complete separation. For communication to be effective, both parts have to contribute in an equal manner. In “The Weekly Visit”, neither Jake nor his mother manages to express openly their feelings.
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