A strong family background is very important for children who have any kind of permanent disease.
In the following will be explained how the life of Jessie, one of the two main character of ""Night Mother" by Marsha Norman, could have been different if she had a stronger mother and a father who did not committed suicide. Jessie was a child who did not had the possibility to be with other children because her mother was too protective. But more important the mother did not had the knowledge about epilepsy and she was too scared of what other people would say if her daughter would have had an epileptic fit outside the house. She passed on this kind of embarrassment to her daughter and this feeling held for a life time. Even though the mother came up with this feeling she is not fully guilty because she did not know it better, she was simply overtaxed with an epileptic child. .
Jessie had to stay inside the house most of the time but as a child she searched for a person to talk to and she found her father. Of course she could talk to him but as a child Jessie needed someone with whom she could have played but instead she talked to a man who was not satisfied with his life either. Jessie got influenced at a very young stage by a depressive man who later also committed suicide because of his unhappiness. These kinds of topics are negative background for a child and only very limited for a teenager but on the other hand she had someone to talk to. Then the mother was the problem again because she was not able to talk to her husband and so she got jealous on her daughter, who in fact talked long hours to him. The marriage between Jessie's parents was everything else than happy. .
Jessie grew up in a cold home and did not had any other influence opposite of the tense atmosphere at home. As a small child who felt that she was not like other children Jessie thought she was guilty of her parent's conflict.