""Everything's going to be all right," I told her. "Everything's going to be all right," she told me. The pretense was sometimes the only thing we had to give each other."(390) In the short story Mama, Dorothy Allison's mother and daughter characters are survivors; they are lower class women with unspoken hardships both inside and outside the home. Both women faced issues that society did not want to confront at the time; therefore the problems were kept quiet. They were placed in an inescapable situation in which they both had to learn how to deal with. Dorothy Allison clearly illustrates the unspoken and unseen hardships of women in the middle of the twentieth century.
             Allison's character mama faced many horrific obstacles throughout her long hard life. She was extremely ill as a child and was ejected through a car windshield when she was nine months pregnant, which in return forced her into labor while she was unconscious. Not only did she survive those two events but she also overcame breast and uterus cancer. Allison depicts mama as a survivor but it did take its toll on her. As a result of her hardened survival skills she became very unrefined and brash woman. "Say anything but begin it with Jesus and end it with *censored*,"(389) clearly shows how crude she can be. She also had to set aside her own desires in order to survive. "Never want what you cannot have,"(390) was her rule for survival and her way of dealing with the bad hand life had dealt her.
             The women also endured massive mental and physical abuse from the main male figure in their lives. The daughter was the main victim of abuse from the first stepfather. He beat her so often that she mentally withdrew into herself while he was doing it, "When my stepfather beat me I pulled so deeply into myself I lived only in my eyes."(387) The mother also suffered at the hands of
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