Make up your own mind

“Make up your own mind” is the counsel Uncle Pa gives Frank McCourt as he considers whether to take the examination for a permanent post-office position. Its importance lies not in promising that choice can overcome hardship, but in insisting that Frank should make the decision himself. Set against his father’s departures for work, the family’s dependence on remittances, and Frank’s eventual passage to America, the phrase becomes a compact statement of self-direction amid economic uncertainty.

The advice and the post-office choice

Frank is sixteen when Uncle Pa challenges his interest in the secure post-office future. Frank reports that the job would make him a postman soon and provide a pension. Uncle Pa rejects the pension as a reason to settle into a life Frank has not chosen: in his view, passing the examination would keep Frank safely in the post office, but might also leave him living according to a conventional pattern rather than making an independent decision.

The exchange turns on a sharply repeated phrase. Uncle Pa tells Frank to make up his own mind and not let cautious people or resentful critics determine his course. When Frank answers that Mr. O’Halloran had given the same advice, Uncle Pa asks what he said. Frank replies, “Make up your own mind.” Uncle Pa then affirms the counsel and places it in Frank’s hands as a decision about his own life. The repetition makes the phrase more than a general maxim: it is a piece of advice Frank can carry from one conversation into another.

Work, departure, and family responsibility

The surrounding story gives the expression a practical setting. Frank’s family has already experienced migration as a response to limited means. His grandmother sends money to Philomena Flynn and Delia Fortune, who buy tickets, find a steamer trunk through the St. Vincent de Paul Society, arrange transport to the Manhattan pier, and see the family onto a ship. Migration here depends on relatives’ money and labor as much as on anyone’s individual resolve.

Frank’s father later agrees to go to England after Christmas because America is at war and he believes the cause must be just. An agent signs him up for factory work in Coventry, promising plentiful work and the possibility of saving money. Before the departure, the family expects that income to make credit possible for basic groceries. The episode distinguishes the father’s labor migration to England from the family’s earlier journey from America and from Frank’s later plan to cross the Atlantic alone.

When his father returns home, he leaves again for Coventry without money for the journey. He takes bread wrapped in newspaper, sets off toward the Dublin road to seek a lift, and tells Frank to go home and care for his mother and brothers. A letter arrives confirming that he reached England safely, followed by a three-pound money order. The family imagines what the money might buy, but the first remittance is not followed by regular payments. The prospect of work abroad therefore offers a brief lift in expectation without ending the household’s insecurity.

The phrase within a longer migration story

By the time Uncle Pa gives his advice, Frank’s own departure has become concrete rather than hypothetical. After taking Mrs. Finucane’s money and destroying her ledger, he sits by the River Shannon and considers leaving. At O’Riordan’s Travel Agency, he learns that flying to America would require going through London and cost a fortune. The agent instead offers passage on the Irish Oak from Cork: a nine-day voyage for fifty-five pounds, with a cabin and thirteen passengers. Frank says he has the money, tells his mother he will leave in a few weeks, and she cries; his brother Michael asks whether the family will all go someday.

That decision gives Uncle Pa’s phrase its later resonance. The advice does not erase the unequal pressures surrounding Frank’s choices: employment, fare, family separation, and the uncertain help of remittances all matter. Nor are the two destinations interchangeable. Coventry represents the father’s search for factory work; America is the destination Frank finally chooses for himself. The expression links personal agency to a wider family history in which movement across borders is repeatedly imagined as a route out, yet exacts the cost of leaving people behind.

Meaning and narrative function

The phrase gains force from the contrast between a pension and a self-directed future. Uncle Pa sees the post-office position as secure, but warns that security can become a life accepted by default. His advice is not an abstract celebration of limitless freedom: Frank’s choices remain bounded by money, available work, and the conditions of travel. The insistence is narrower and more credible—that even within those limits, Frank should own the decision.

Its repeated appearance also connects different generations’ responses to uncertainty. Frank’s father goes to England for work, sending a first payment that briefly raises the family’s hopes; Frank later arranges his own passage to America. Between those movements, the remembered advice supplies a verbal thread. It names the principle behind Frank’s departure without disguising the material circumstances that make departure seem necessary. The expression’s significance lies in that tension: making up one’s mind is an act of independence, but the choices available have already been shaped by hardship and separation.