Cate Kennedy’s “Tender” portrays one night and morning in the life of the story’s protagonist, Christine. In anticipation of an appointment for a biopsy, she attempts to exercise control over her home and her family, which consists of her husband, Al, and two young children, Hannah and Jamie. However, Christine finds that, in spite of her efforts, their lives are inevitably full of uncertainty. Through Christine’s actions, Kennedy suggests that the urge to maintain control of one’s life is a natural human impulse, but also that any sense of control is only an illusion in the face of unexpected events.
Throughout the story, Christine is constantly planning ahead and taking responsibility for the family’s wellbeing. She has avoided putting her biopsy appointment on their calendar so that the children won’t see it and fret about it, even though Al has already told them. She also tells Al that she’ll leave the car at the station for him and plans to be back for dinner, but later expresses concern that she might not make it home in time, wondering if she should leave some tuna and pasta so that he can make the only dish he knows how to cook. Even though she is going to the hospital for an operation, her focus is on ensuring the day will go smoothly for the rest of the family—not for herself. When Christine sees mice in the kitchen, she immediately places mousetraps out and notes that Al will need to check them in the morning, since the children would want a funeral and burial for any dead mice, making them late for school. Once again, her train of thought reveals a thoroughly planned sequence of events in her family’s best interests. After Jamie goes to bed with his school project unfinished, Christine cannot help completing the diorama for him. She stays up for several hours decorating the diorama and collecting items from around the house, despite needing to catch a train early in the morning. And later, she remembers to unset and collect the traps even with only half an hour to catch the train.
Because she is such a careful planner, Christine expresses frustration when events and people do not follow her plans. She feels “a familiar mix of guilt and resentment” about how her home does not match the “grand theory of sustainability” she and Al once wanted to uphold. Instead, their lives have been “modified [for] a more prosaic reality,” in which she dreams of having an electric oven, Al entertains himself by going on the Internet, and “one hour of sanctioned TV a night” keeps the children occupied. Christine is annoyed with Al when he plays with the children while bathing them, well past their scheduled dinnertime. Unlike her, he does not address responsibilities in an organized manner, instead handling them as they come. His unfinished bookshelves lie around the house, and Christine is often frustrated with how nonchalant and relaxed he is towards his responsibilities at home. Jamie also defies Christine’s expectations; she fantasizes about him reading peacefully to his little sister, but this dream does not materialize. Instead, the two children fight over bath toys and scream across the house. Jamie leaves action figures strewn across the floor and Hannah demands to play with nail polish, leaving Christine anxious about their behavior and her influence on them. To add to Christine’s mounting anxiety, the lump that triggered her hospital visits worries her throughout the story, even though she cannot do anything about it beyond the biopsy she has scheduled for the following morning. She thinks of her own body as no longer trustworthy, despite the lack of a certain diagnosis, and understandably considers the worst-case scenario of the tumor being cancerous.
In the end, Christine accepts that her sense of control is only an illusion, and that she must trust that her family can take care of themselves without her. While she prepares to finish Jamie’s diorama and catch the train, her mind wanders to a memory of Al competently shaking out the children’s inside out pajamas, which reassures her that he can manage responsibilities when he needs to. Even though he only cooks one dish, that dish feeds the family, and even though his coworkers at the community center aren’t quite sure how he does his work, “it all comes together in the end” somehow. Christine takes a look at both Jamie and Hannah before departing, describing them as healthy and full of life, “flawless” and “perfect” children. Despite her earlier frustrations with Jamie’s forgotten homework and action figures, or Hannah’s desire to do her nails like “a miniature Paris Hilton,” she accepts her children as they are, and implicitly acknowledges that they don’t need her micromanaging them in order to grow up successfully.
At the end of the story, Christine releases the springs on all the mousetraps she set out and collects them, implying none of them were successful in catching the mice. Though the mice are pests, they are essentially out of Christine’s control, and setting out traps is not guaranteed to catch any. In the same vein, her adherence to a healthy, natural lifestyle did not prevent her from developing what might be a malignant tumor, nor did her strict parenting style produce perfectly well-behaved children. By calmly picking the traps up before leaving for the hospital, she accepts that her sense of control over her environment is only an illusion; in reality, her best efforts can sometimes fail anyway.
Related Themes from Other Texts
The Illusion of Control ThemeTracker
The Illusion of Control Quotes in Tender
She remembers Al and her arguing over whether to render the walls with mud and cement or just mud—statistics about toxicity, about pure environments, about every bloody thing, things that buckled in the face of practicality and time. Now the solar panels are just a booster for an electric system like everyone else's, and to Christine that seems to sum up the whole experiment: it's a bonus, a gesture, a grand theory of sustainability modified to a more prosaic reality. The trees outside, which she'd imagined sprouting into a shady arbour, are taller and stalkier now but still unmistakably seedlings, painstakingly hand-watered from the dam and the bath. The piles of clay turned over by digging the house site still glint exposed through the thin groundcovers, and Jamie's BMX track has worn a looping circuit through the landscaping, turning her plans for terracing into an assortment of jumps and scrambles. Christine puts more wood in the firebox and, with a familiar mix of guilt and resentment, dreams her nightly dream of an electric oven.
Then the doctor, finally, looking through the ultrasound films as he made a point of giving her the reassuring statistics of how many lumps turn out to be benign. She'd hated the way he'd stared off over her head as his fingers had coolly explored the lump, gazing into the distance like someone solving a mental equation.
[…]
Him writing something on her card, like his final answer in a quiz, before meeting her eyes again. Briskness and neutrality finetuned, as he said, 'Best to take that out and have a good look at it, I think.'
She finds herself watching him, sometimes, still a little incredulous at the dreamy way he handles life, how everything seems to flow around him. Once at a barbeque held at the community centre where he works, she'd impulsively asked a colleague how he managed everything there at the office.
‘Oh, fine,’ the woman had said, surprised. 'Al just does his own thing, you know? It all comes together in the end.’
Here at home, she never sees it coming together. Everything, on the contrary, seems to be teetering on the verge of coming apart. That, or just sinking into neglect, like the wheelbarrow half-full of compost and the shovel which has been buried in weeds for over a fortnight, outside the kitchen window.
[…]
Christine supposes she should be grateful he's so laid-back—relaxed with the kids, always in the same amiable mood. But he's so vague, that's the trouble, so blind to how much organising she has to do around him to keep it all running. It's like she has three kids, not two.
She gets up, silently, at five, nagged by an unfinished vision and the sensation of the night draining away. Out in the garden she's calm again, feeling the dew drench her ankles and the bottom of her white cotton nightdress. She can sleep on the train, anyway. She walks slowly through the hillocks and raised beds, seeing her nightdress billow like a faintly luminous ghost, pausing to inhale the deep spicy smell of the lemon-scented gum.
Then, cold but wide awake and ready, she locates each of the five mousetraps she's set and kneels down in front of each of them in turn. Carefully, with the flat of her hand, she releases the springs so that the small metal trays of bait slip from the jagged hook holding them in place. She's humming to herself as she grasps each straining metal bar and guides it back to let it settle, with a benign and harmless snap, against the small rectangle of wood.
