What they don’t understand about birthdays and what
they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten,
and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and
three, and two, and one.
What Cisneros means is that you never feel different and you will always act every single age you once was. A teenager will act like she is 2 just to get her mother’s attention or act like she is 13 in school so she doesn’t end up in trouble.
And when you wake up on your
eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven, but you don’t.
What Cisneros is trying to say is that when it’s your birthday you feel like it was every other day. When it’s your birthday the first thing you think about is if the day that you were born looks like today.
And maybe one day when
you’re all grown up maybe you will need to cry like if you’re
three, and that’s okay.
Sometime it’s hard for young people to cry and it hurts so badly that they just want to pour out the tears and cry me a river. And sometimes its good to cry like you’re three years old. When you finally cry, ou feel a little bit better.
That’s what I tell Mama when she’s sad
and needs to cry. Maybe she’s feeling three
She is saying that no matter what age you are. They always be parts in you where you will be younger then you are. The way you feel and act will be basically all the ages you ever were. We are never to younger and never to old for the ways that we act.That is what we are at heart.
Only today I wish I didn’t have only eleven years
rattling inside me like pennies in a tin Band-Aid box.
Here Cisneros is giving imagery to 11 pennies rattling around in a tin Band-Aid box. She would like like to have 102 pennies. So she would feel smart and know what to say and how to act in all situations. She understands that with age, comes wisdom.Some people think if the were older, they would have more experience and have more common sense, or they might think what would they have become.
Maybe because I’m skinny, maybe because she doesn’t
like me, that stupid Sylvia Saldivar says, “I think it belongs to
Rachel.” An ugly sweater like that all raggedy and old, but
Mrs. Price believes her
“Don’t worry about people who don’t like you. They don’t get paid for not liking you, right? So it doesn’t matter, as long as your friends and family like you, right?”This happens to young people sometimes. Some people are too scared or embarrassed to say anything, and it’s as if their mouths stopped working for those few seconds.
But when the sick feeling goes away and I open my eyes,
the red sweater’s still sitting there like a big red mountain.
as soon as the feeling goes away she is instantly reminded of the awful embarrassing feeling that the red old sweater made her feel.
Not mine,
not mine, not mine.
She is so embarrassed that she is trying so hard to make herself believe that the sweater is not hers.She is 100% sure that the sweater does not belong to her, yet she has trouble telling this to her teacher. This shows that Rachel is not confused whether the sweater is hers, but rather she is having a hard time being able to tell her teacher that the sweater is not hers.
Mrs. Price
pretends like everything’s okay.
That happens to most kids. They know they are right, and when the truth comes out, the adults seem to not care and not take the effort to apologize to them.
but I wish I was one hundred
and two.
She wishes she was older because she believes that as she gets older, she’ll be more mature and become more powerful over controlling her emotions. Something she cannot do at the age of eleven.There are days when you just want that day to end, and you want to go far away. You want to forget that day immediately.
Explanation:
