I Stand Here Ironing

One of my readers suggested that I publish on the blog my letter to Tillie Olsen about “I Stand Here Ironing.” So I am.

That said, please buy the book of short stories. Here is a short summary of Tillie Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing” as copyright infringement limits my ability to put up the whole short story:

Tillie Olsen's story "I Stand Here Ironing" recounts a poor working woman's ambivalence about her parenting skills and her eldest daughter's future. Published in Olsen's first collection of stories, Tell Me a Riddle, in 1961, this first-person story contains many autobiographical elements. Central to the plot is the metaphor of a mother ironing her daughter's dress as she mentally attempts to ''iron'' out her uneasy relationship with her daughter through a stream-of-consciousness monologue. The narrator, a middle-aged mother of five, as Olsen was when she wrote the story, is the type of woman whose story was seldom heard at that time: that of a working-class mother who must hold down a job and care for children at the same time. ''Her father left me before she was a year old," the mother says, a circumstance that mirrored Olsen's predicament as a young mother. The story was heralded by the emerging women's movement of the early 1960s as an example of the difficulty of some women's lives and as a portrayal of the self-doubt many mothers suffer when they know their children are not receiving all the attention they deserve. Love or longing is not enough, Olsen says; everything must be weighed against forces that are beyond one's control. Though the story is not overtly political, it presents the type of economic condition that inspired Olsen to become active in left-wing labor causes at a young age. ''I Stand Here Ironing,'' an unromantic portrait of motherhood, is perhaps the most frequently anthologized of Olsen's stories.

I wrote my reaction to Tillie’s short story back in the day on a typewriter. I also had trouble finding my original piece. But after much digging I found it. So, I have transcribed it here with all of its grammatical mistakes. I think that it, substantively, still stands up even though it was written under limited constraints and with my newly found and emerging voice. This piece is particularly difficult for me to post as it still breaks my heart and brings me to tears.

Dear Tillie Olsen:

Thank you for writing this story. I am an unfit mother as is my mother and her mother, and her mother before her. This is of course true because we are all trying to mother in an unfit world.

We do not need any “experts” to tell us this because we know it already. We carry our guilt to the ironing board everyday. But like the experts as daughters we tend to blame our mother for being unfit instead of the world. Like the experts we focus on the mothers changing instead of changing the world. I have had a child and I now see the folly of that approach. But it is always so much easier to blame the victim than it is to attack the perpetrator. So, we continue to rape our mothers just as society does. I am trying to stop that from happening. Thank you for writing this story because that is just what your story does, it rapes society.

My mother had to send my sister and me away to one of those special places where we were uncontaminated by personal belongings and love. She had no choice. I now know that, at the time I didn’t. It was an awful place to be: St. Agnes’s Guild in Worcester Massachusetts was run by nuns.

We could not wear our own clothes; we had to wear clothes that were gifts from the “rich” people who made donations. We could not have our own dolls; we had to have dolls that we rotated with the other kids, because we shouldn’t needlessly become too attached. “God” forbid. My sister and I were separated from one another so that we could learn to become independent. I was four and she was two. My two year old sister did not understand independence and neither did I. We did however understand the meaning of being lonely. My sister almost died from being independent. A broken heart was what they called it. They wouldn’t let me even see her as she continued to lose weight and she refused to eat.

I snuck up to see her one day and cried as I saw her laying the crib in the infirmary. She looked like a lifeless rag doll lying in that cold room. She couldn’t move, couldn’t cry. She looked dead. She was almost dead.

When they found me there they beat me, and separated me from all the other children until I learned to follow the rules and be a “good girl.”

They had to call my mother in Virginia and have her come back because my baby sister had to go into the hospital: she was dying. My mother had to leave everything we owned, what little there was and come back to Worcester. She wouldn’t have time to make arrangements to send the stuff north to our new home. She had to help save my sister’s life.

She did come home and my sister did survive that special place where we were uncontaminated by personal things and love. So did I survive. But my mother will never survive the guilt no matter how many times I tell her that I know what it was like for her in 1953 and that she had no other choice. Because the experts blame her not the world in which she was trying to do the hardest job in the world.

No matter what I say to my mother she knows that I don’t know that particular guilt that she has because I have never had to place my son somewhere like that. But she knows that I know the pain that I felt about being there and I can’t erase her guilt no matter how hard I try.

Thank you Tillie Olsen.

Love, Tuli

God Bless my Mother and all Mothers who have to make such decisions in an unjust world. And God Bless you Tillie Olsen for giving us a voice.