Wiley, whose occupation is a seaman, is frequently absent, but his absences are tolerable for Helene and she does not miss her husband very much. Nel becomes Helene's main priority. Helene wants Nel to become a good citizen of Medallion. She also wants Nel to get married to a well-mannered gentlemen one day. Helene make a mistake by guarding Nel's every move and does not like to see any exposure of inappropriate behavior so that "any enthusiasms that little Nel showed were calmed by her mother until she drove her daughter's imagination underground" (Morrison 18). Helene does not see anything wrong in her behavior- what she is trying to do is to protect her daughter. Helene does not want Nel to lose Nel from the community in any shameful way like Helene's Creole family did. However, what Helene does not see is that Nel is missing her affection which is clear after Helene and Nel return home from their visit from New Orleans to Nels grandmother, whom she sees only once in her life, and when Nel cannot stop thinking about the way her grandmother embraced her: "Nel sat on the red-velvet sofa listening to her mother but remembering the smell and the tight, tight hug of the woman in yellow" (Morrison 28). Helene never showed this kind of affection to her daughter and this is why Nel cannot get the image of her grandmother's hug out of her head. Nel's mother, Helene, is deeply interested in protecting her daughter's well-being but as Beaulieu points out, Helene "is not particularly „maternal" or nurturing" (116). The ways in which Helene shows her affection for her daughter are not exactly motherly in 'the sense that Helene critiques Nels' appearance or does not allow her daughter to behave like a child. Helene fails to provide Nel with the sense of the unique self-worth when she makes her daughter pull her "broad flat nose" which Nel inherited from her father (Morrison 18).