Character experience focus: Laura

As a woman listening to the mother reflect on her past and the decisions she made, It really touches a tender place in me because I am at the age of decision. The crossroad is where I feel like I am. The place in life where you have to without fully knowing what’s best as we never will, make decisions about who you are, what you want, and whom you would like to be in this world. Everything in life is without certainty, and so we make the best decisions we can with the information we have at that time and reap the harvest of those seeds much later in life. By the time we see what we have, too much time has passed to change any of it and so you use what you have to make the best reality that you can for yourself and the people you love. Listening to the mother in The glass Menagerie  I wonder what influenced her decision to choose her husband. However, Her tone and the language used to describe when they met I would imagine it to have been carnal. I imagine her with all of these eligible gentleman callers full of potential. I imagine that made her feel like she could have anything in this world. I imagine that no matter how  true or embellished her stories may have been, the options she did have caused her to place herself on somewhat of an indestructible pedestal of companionship. I imagine her never even considering the possibility of struggle in her future. I imagine her with all the options in the world meeting a man who by pure passion and attraction shifted her desire all to him and by the time she came down enough to see the seed that they had planted the harvest had already begun to bud into a rotten harvest. I imagine by this time all the other options she once had access to would now be occupied or degraded. 

As we watch the mother desperately try to set her daughter up. We start to see what looks like it may be a connection budding between Laura and her gentleman caller. We see Laura in her shyness begin to loosen up. We she someone begin to speak to her in a way that is true & honest yet gentle. Someone outside of her family telling her that she is enough. That all of her shame is being amplified by her own thoughts rather than her reality. We see her beaming while hearing this from someone whom she has admired  most of her life in secret. As the scene goes on we see them get close, and then we watch him pull away with the energy of not  wanting to give Laura the wrong idea. When in fact everything  that he has given her is that of his interest. While I feel that he may have felt that he was doing the right thing, being polite, or simply doing Laura a favor by offering her the experience of a mans interest, I feel that by reeling someone who is shy and fearful by nature into the level of comfort with no intentions of following through actually does more damage than it could ever do good. To bring about hope just to snatch it away is worse than to not give hope at all. Simply being nice would have been better. A person can live without something they have never had by hanging onto small dreams and thoughts of what it might be like, But to have had and felt a thing and then have to live without it is pure torture.