Little Mary’s Messy Room Symbol Analysis

The mess in Little Mary’s room symbolizes the messiness of Cedar’s life, especially in regards to her complicated and strained family relationships. When Cedar is visiting her birth mother’s house for the first time, she is shocked to meet her younger sister, Little Mary—a sassy, hostile teenager who, as it happens, has a very messy room. While at her birth mother’s house, Cedar finally grasps the extent to which her engagement with her birth family will require a great deal of emotional energy and labor on her part. She hasn’t been willing to engage with this work thus far in life, but over the course of the story she slowly opens to the possibility of it. Her engagement with the mess in Little Mary’s room parallels this gradual willingness to untangle her knotty and complicated family life. At first, Cedar is disgusted by the mess in the room, and refuses to help her younger sister to sort through it. But by the end of the story, forced to flee into Little Marys’ room to temporarily avoid confronting her birth family and adoptive parents together, Cedar willingly begins to help Little Mary sort through the chaos. As the girls clean, they begin to speak more kindly to one another, and the story even closes with Little Mary wrapping her arms around Cedar lovingly. So, by avoiding her two families and fleeing into Little Mary’s messy room, Cedar actually ends up in the arms of more family, and her sorting through the room’s contents suggests that Cedar is beginning to open herself up to exploring her family relationships.