I don't want to read anyone's comments before I write something down here. Not even our professor's notes; did glance at it the Story Club posing, something about weeping, and I knew I had to not read that. Not yet.
This is a story that has sat on my shelf for some 47 years, in Olsen’s Tell Me a Riddle, the blue paperback cover creased but in fairly good shape, considering this book has traveled with me all those years. “I Stand Here Ironing” is the narrative of a mother reflecting on the struggle of raising of her daughter in the 1930s and 1940s as a working-class single mother. Olson wrote the story in 1954, when I was 4 years old. At that time, my mother was the one doing the ironing, with three young children underfoot. But then, sometimes she hired the neighbor girl to do the family ironing, which of course must be done. And as soon as I was old enough to learn how, age 11 or 12 maybe, the ironing became my job. (My three brothers were out mowing lawn while I was stuck in the house).
But when I read “I Stand Here Ironing” in a Woman’s Literature class in college in the early 1970s, I never have imagined that what Tillie Olson was writing about was going to later hit me so close to home. That a decade later I would find myself a single mother with a young daughter, and the toll that can take.
In that class in 1973 (probably it was) we so loved reading Tillie Olsen, along with Grace Paley, Adrienne Rich, and Denise Levertov. At the time I was just thrilled to be reading a story I understood easily, could relate to fully, and could write college papers about in a way that seemed effortless at the time.
Olson remembers her daughter as a toddler, so beautiful:
"She blew shining bubbles of sound."
But then the child had to be left with caregivers, and the mother recalls picking her up at the end of a long working day:
... "When she saw me would break into a clogged weeping that could not be comforted, a weeping I can hear yet." ... "What in me demanded that goodness in her? And what was the cost, the cost to her of such goodness?"
These passages still stun me in their simplicity and profound sadness.
... "Her face is closed and somber, but when she wants, how fluid."... "I do not know if the girls still wear those gigantic red bows and the ravaged looks on the every other Sunday..." "Oh, she had physical lightness and brightness, twinkling by on skates..." "'Licorice was his favorite and I brought him some every day, but he still liked Jennifer better'n me. Why, Mommy?'"..."She would select beads and single earrings, bottle tops and shells, dried flowers and pebbles, old postcards and scraps, all sorts of oddments; then she and Susan would play Kingdom,..."
""Shoogily," he breathes and curls closer." ... "We have left it all to her, and the gift has as often eddied inside, clogged and clotted, as been used and growing."... "She is so lovely. Why did you want me to come in at all? Why were you concerned? She will find her way." ... " I will never total it all. I will never come in to say: she was a child seldom smiled at."
I've just read through and picked out some of my favorite lines. Copied them in here in this little newsletter post. Wishing and thinking how maybe, just maybe I could write something like this from my memories of raising my own daughter. The "mornings of crisis and near hysteria" we often had when I was a working single mom for four years. But no, it was nothing like what Tillie Olson is talking about here. My daughter was smiled at all the time. She loved her preschool teachers, and I did as well, since they gave her care and love and freedom while I worked. But she was different in a different way from Emily of Tillie Olsen’s story. My daughter was fun-loving and talkative. What happened was that the counselor in junior high said "but she's so smart, so capable, why is she getting all D's and F'?” Why indeed.
I was very fortunate to have only been a single mother for 4 or 5 years. With support from parents and family and friends, things got better. When my daughter was six, I remarried, had another child with my very supportive husband, and life went on. In another post I will attempt to write about what it was like to having a daughter with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, as it is now officially called, when experts did not understand how ADHD showed up in girls.
* * *
When I saw that George Saunders was assigning Tillie Olson for us to read after that tedious picking apart of the lines of My First Goose by Issac Babel, about killing a goose and then feeling bad about it (I know its an excellent story, a good model to learn from, just not my cup of tea), I thought, ok great, I can still feel like part of this club. Saunders has now picked "I Stand Here Ironing" like previously he picked Berriault’s "The Stone Boy."
I took Tell Me A Riddle off the shelf, but could not make myself re-read the story for a week because of the huge sadness welling up inside me, just thinking about it. I wasn’t sure I would be able to stand that much sadness. Because as I remembered the story, the child was young, not age nineteen. And I remember it as darker than maybe it has to be. The story goes several directions for me now, not all sad, heavy, but not hopeless. However, the last paragraph always stuck with me, and hits me again, now:
"Let her be. So that all that is in her will not bloom -- but in how many does it? There is still enough left to live by. Only help her to know -- help make it so there is cause for her to know -- that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron."
All that is in her will not bloom? A mother is ok with that for her daughter? How can that be? How could she possibly say such a thing? Such resignation, such sadness. And the plea for help. Just let her not believe that she has no choices in life. Just leave her be, let her be herself. She is the child of what happened, "a child of anxious, not proud, love."
I admit I have trouble with this ending, with the mother essentially shrugging off expectations of whatever it means for a young woman to "bloom." Maybe the narrator/mother is thinking of her own life, how so much was so difficult for herself, and how she is still standing there ironing. How she herself is stuck, helpless in some ways, and how she can not allow herself to hope for much more for herself or for her daughter's life. But the image of Emily near the end of the story is one of self-assurance (a sort of happiness?), of skipping lightly away from standard responsibilities, since as she says "we'll all be atom-dead" in a few years.
But the mother isn't having it. Because of being brought to the task of "dredging the past," she "cannot endure" her daughter's glib response. So she makes the plea, to the social worker, or counselor, or well-meaning person being addressed in the story for help. To society at large: help to make it so my daughter can believe there is a way forward for her in the world.
End of draft 2, updated 7/3/2022