Choice of the Narrator/Protagonist

Decided to go back to one of the stories I have turned in for Beth Ann Bauman's workshop. In a nutshell, it's a story about a little girl getting into a school, or rather not getting into a school. It was one of the first stories that I had ever written, and admittedly, had more autobiographical details than a lot of the other stuff I had written more recently. It wasn't a very popular story in the preceding workshops. Most of my colleagues thought the story wasn't going anywhere, there wasn't much happening, and while I do think, part of it has to do with the American school of setting up the conflict-exploring the conflict-resolution of the conflict model, the story too had some glaring problems. Part of it is that, I was too attached to the authenticity of the material, the real-life occurrences, rather than the logic of the story. So, as a result, it kept seeming like a sweet little childhood story, an exercise, more than an actual story. Hardly any readers caught on the intensity of the violence I was trying to communicate, the inherent violence with which we begin our lives within an educational institution. So, part of the revision process meant that I throw out a lot of the autobiographical stuff, situate this little girl, the protagonist of the story in a background very different from mine in certain ways, and actually, make life much more harder for her than it had ever been for me.

But then, I landed in another problem. Most of my readers wanted the story to be narrated in a first-person voice, Beth herself thought that the main character is too young to reflect upon the crises I am dealing with, and instead of having her as the main character, I should have the mother narrate the story, who clearly has more at stake. I do agree, and I do think, that needs to be a totally different story, which, at this point is slow-cooking in the back-burner of the stove. But I do want this story to be this little girl's, and although I am not sure why, I am resisting the first-person narration, because it seems to me, it will take away a lot from the story. So, at this point, I am just trying to figure out where this story can go, and reading Richard Russo's essay In Defense of Omniscience, hoping it will provide me with some clues to my problems.