Jacob Have I Loved

Katherine Paterson

4 ideas

1. The forgotten healthy twin at birth

   Sara Louise Bradshaw grows up on Rass Island in the Chesapeake Bay believing her whole life was shaped by the night she and her twin Caroline were born. Caroline was frail, and everyone rushed to save her while the healthy Louise was left unattended. Years later, as a nurse-midwife in an Appalachian valley, Louise delivers twins, fights to keep the sickly one alive, and suddenly realizes she has forgotten the strong baby, so she tells the grandmother to hold it, repeating the old neglect and then reversing it.

2. Grievance keeps you waiting for permission

   A person who defines herself by the love she was denied often stays trapped because she waits for someone to release her, when nobody is actually holding her back. When Louise finally tells her mother she wants to leave the island, her mother says she will miss her but never meant to keep her. Resentment had made Louise misread her own lack of initiative as a prison others had built.

3. Seeing favoritism as divine predestination

   Louise's grandmother taunts her with Romans 9:13, "Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated." Louise hears in the verse that some people are chosen and others are rejected before they do anything. Reading your life this way turns ordinary unequal attention into a cosmic sentence, so every slight becomes proof and every kindness looks like an exception.

4. The unrewarded sacrifice of the capable child

   In a family, the sturdy child's sacrifices tend to be taken for granted, while the gifted or fragile child's needs attract resources. During the war Louise works the crab boats like a man to bring home money. Yet it is Caroline's singing that wins Captain Wallace's money for music school in Baltimore, and Caroline later marries Louise's friend Call, leaving Louise's competence as the reason she gets overlooked.

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