I Stand Here Ironing

Emily’s mother feels guilty because her “wisdom” came “too late, but only she knows that Emily “will find her way” that she is strong enough to do it. The narrator, a thirty-eight years old women who spent her life raising five children, is overwhelmed by guilt because she wasn’t always available for her daughter and she treated her different then her other kids. She realizes know that in her daily struggle of raising her children she forgot to show her daughter how much she loved her, and the fact that her daughter was more then the dress on the ironing board for her. In school she was a “slow learner” always unprepared “stammering and unsure in her classes” because she was helping her mother at home “be a mother, and housekeeper, and shopper”. e towards her daughter in the extended metaphor used by the author at the end of the story “ she is more then this dress on the ironing board”.

Although, Emily was a hurt and introverted child that “kept too much in herself” she has always found the strength to deal with tough situation; when her mother was away she invented a word ”shoogily” to comfort herself. She had asthma and was “thin and dark and foreign-looking at a time when every little girl was supposed to look or thought she should look a chubby blonde replica of Shirley Temple”.

The caller disturbed the narrator; there is not easy to talk about her daughter “ …what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron”, but she decides to tell her story and relieve the pain that had pushed hard on her chest for years.

Emily’s first six years of life were extremely difficult: her father left before she was one year old and her mother worked whenever she found something to work being forced to leave her daughter with all kind of caregivers. Emily was a child, which accepted the situation without “direct protest” or “rebellion”. She believes that the main problem was the difficult period America went through during the Great Depression, but the fact that she was very young and had to raise the kid for six years by herself makes the story to be relevant in our days, too. ”Who needs help…” and “why were you concerned?” her mother says to the person on the phone. When she was two, she was put in a nursery school compared by the narrator with “parking places for children” where the teacher was “evil”. There is no physical description of the apartment in which Emily lived as a child, but there is a clue that the place was not very clean “the place smelling sour” and was located upstairs.