For this assignment, you will be writing a response to the essay you selected for your Week 2 Outline. The purpose of a draft is to give your instructor a good sense of your organizational writing ski

MAGGIE DOWNS’S ‘TIM GUNN AND A LEAKY SHOWER: WELCOME TO MY LIFE LITTLE GUY 5

Analysis of Maggie Downs’s ‘Tim Gunn and a Leaky Shower: Welcome to my life little guy

Yesenia Cruz

ENG 121 English Composition I

Kristen Sanders

March 1, 2019

Analysis of Maggie Downs’s ‘Tim Gunn and a Leaky Shower: Welcome to my life little guy

Mothers are champions and celebrating them only once a year trivializes the extraordinary effort and sacrifice that they make every day for their children. Traditionally, nurturing was viewed as a woman’s job, and thus she was expected to figure out a way around the challenges and make it work. As such, it can be argued that the society has come a long way to recognize that motherhood is a fulfilling, but tough experience as each case presents unique challenges that the new parents had never dealt with before. However, mere recognition is not enough; instead, society should abandon the mentality that shifts all the motherhood responsibilities to the mother only to watch from a distance. At the moment, all that women can do is emulate Maggie Downs’s tactics which entail assessing the existing challenges and improvising to make things work out. In this regard, the paper argues that motherhood demonstrates a journey of courage and resilience that is rarely recognized by the community.

In the article, ‘Tim Gunn and a Leaky Shower: Welcome to my life little guy,’ Maggie Downs’s fantasizes about having a Tim Gunn in her life. The admirable figure will act as a source of guidance in a situation that she thought was beyond her control. According to the author, the birth of her son coincided with summer and the repair of their condo. The workers could arrive at 6.00 am and work until late into the dark (Downs, 2015). Throughout the day, Downs had to deal with noise from the continuous pounding, footsteps and, a crying baby but staying outside was not an option due to the extreme temperatures. Given the situation, it is apparent that Maggie wished that the reconstruction could be finished within the shortest time possible to restore the house in a state that could offer a bit of comfort to her and the little one.

I chose the communication/speaking out for this essay, because the mom could’ve spoken out about how the whole situation was affecting her life with the new baby in the home, while the crew was doing the fixing. The new mom could’ve gotten a little more help in regards on how the whole situation went down, the landlord could’ve at least tried to make everyone living in the condo comfortable by adding ac’s, fans, and or maybe letting them stay in an empty condo while the crew fixed the on-going restroom leaking issues. As stated in the Communication Strategies “Yet perhaps the most effective ways of improving communication are also the simplest - taking the time to really notice your colleagues, listening to how they speak as well as what they say, and remembering that what happens inside of us, in particular how we feel, will have a profound influence on what we do” by Emerald Group. Who knows the landlord probably would’ve realized that this little family just had a newborn and might’ve helped them out while the crew did their thing to fix the leakage.

However, Maggie does not engage with the workers as she lets them work without interruptions. Instead, she identifies ways to make life manageable. For instance, she makes the nursery room floor her temporal bed and resort to using a paper plate to avoid a pile-up of dirty dishes. Note that Maggie makes a considerable shift from a mentality of perfectionism to necessity based on three catchy words ‘Make it work’ used by her TV idol. The new mum relies on the same phrases when she gets the sad news that the new shower floor was built at a wrong angle. This mistake meant that the torment and sacrifices that Maggie had made throughout the reconstruction period were useless. Instead of getting hysterical, Maggie proposes a modification that would resolve the issue in the meantime.

Maggie Downs’s article depicts a mother’s journey towards restoring control and normalcy in her life regardless of multiple unfavorable factors within her environment. Maggie ‘grows’ from feeling helpless as evidenced by her need to get an ‘escape’ that is watching the past episodes of the runway project to figuring out a strategy to her existing situation. Like most mothers, Maggie finds the necessary balance that is often lost once a newborn joins the family leading to the conclusion that motherhood places one in a situation that brings out one’s courage and ability to adapt or perhaps speaking out with proper communication.

Reference

Downs, M. (2015, July 1). Tim Gunn and a Leaky Shower: Welcome to my Life, Little Guy . Washington Post .

Communication Strategies, edited by Group Emerald, Emerald Publishing Limited, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.proxy-library.ashford.edu/lib/ashford-ebooks/detail.action?docID=282890.