Everyone has or will encounter ad different situation in life where they must deal with emotional pain of getting over a broken relationship. Both Victor Martinez in his story “Parrot in the oven” and Kesha in her song “Praying” address the human emotion to show how difficult it is to get over emotional pain, but to also how important it is to find peace within yourself. In the story “Parrot in the oven” Manny the main character and his family don’t always see eye to eye because of their differences. Equivalently, in “Praying” the speaker wants to move on from a painful past relationship. In them both, we find out the difficulties challenges in life and moving on will make you stronger person in the long run.

A common problem in both text is coping with past pain and moving forward on will make you stronger. In “Parrot in the oven” Manny did nothing to help his family when his farther would have his episodes due to the fear something would happen to him. As a result of it this continued to happened in later years and Manny started to distance himself from his family. The speaker in “Praying” states that ” you brought the flames and put me through hell..” to show how much the person had hurt her. She further states that “I had to learn how to fight for myself…”which shows that she got stronger over a matter of time, even with all the pain she went through. In both texts, the characters are negatively affected by relationships with others and have the desire to find inner peace.

Even though they both show how to deal with negative relationship, there are differences between how the theme occurs in the two texts, In “Parrot in the oven” Martinez shows what happens when not showing his pain from the past. Manny’s actions cause others more pain, which is shown in the way Manny acts when something bad happens to someone throughout the story. In contrast, in “Praying” Kesha show us the positive effect of dealing with painful life experiences and actually wanting the best for those who cause us pain. The speaker strongly and proudly states that “well, you were wrong and now the best is yet to come/ ‘come I can make it on my own / and I don’t need you, I found the strength I’ve never known.” This shows that although she went through a difficult time in her relationship with this person she is both moving on with her life an thriving as an individual because she is stronger than she was stinger than before.

Is both “Parrot in the oven” and “Praying”, Victor Martinez and Kesha show the importance of dealing with the pain you endure in life and finding with yourself. After studying both the story and the song, the readers might conclude that in the end it is up to the individual person to decide how to handle difficult life events; you can either hold the pain and wind up hurting others around you, or you can forgive those who can have hurt you, find inner peace, and move on with your life.