How does the title "All the Years of Her Life" relate to the story's overall meaning?
"All the Years of her Life" refers to the culminated pain Alfred's mother has experienced during the course of her life, leading her to be broken and frightened under her façade of strength. In this story, she is pained by Alfred's repeated delinquency, such as his problems with petty theft...
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that lead to him being fired from his job in the pharmacy and almost arrested. However, the story gives several hints that she has been broken in other parts of her life.
For example, when they get home after Mrs. Higgins's calm and self-assurance has saved Alfred, she warns him not to tell his father, who works at night, anything about what happened. This suggest that the father might react with rage. Alfred also remembers that his mother
had sat alone in the kitchen the night his young sister had kept repeating doggedly that she was getting married.
It sounds as if his mother very much did not want the sister to get married. We don't know why: did she think it was a bad marriage decision, or did she regret losing a daughter who was a buffer against Mr. Higgins? Whatever the reason, Alfred realizes that other blows that have helped break his mother.
These hints of other issues suggest that Mrs. Higgins has had to put up a façade to hide her fear and grief for all of her life. Alfred, as he realizes, has not been her only problem.
What is the theme of "All the Years of Her Life"?
This isn’t the first time that Alfred Higgins has gotten into trouble, nor is it the first time that his mother has had to bail him out. And Alfred’s behavior as he and his mother make their silent way home is as arrogant and as cocky as ever. But later on that night, something changes. As Alfred peeps round the kitchen door and sees his frightened mother raise a trembling hand to her lips as she drinks a cup of tea, he achieves something of an epiphany. For the first time in his life, he can empathize with his mother; he can finally understand all the hardships she’s endured in life, and how he, Alfred, has caused so many of them.
As he looks at her through the crack in the kitchen door, it’s as if he’s seeing his mother for the very first time. No longer arrogant and full of macho bravado, Alfred has achieved a degree of maturity that would have been unthinkable only a few hours previously when Mr. Carr, his former employer at the drugstore, caught him with some stolen items in his possession. That maturity has been reached through empathy, through a recognition of all that Mrs. Higgins has experienced in her life.