"I Stand Here Ironing" by Tillie Olsen is a fictional piece of literature written in the time of the Great Depression. This is a literary piece that a mother views her past and recognizes the mistakes that she had made and the choices that she felt and knew were wrong. The story seems at first to be a simple meditation of a mother reconstructing her daughter's past in an attempt to explain present behavior. In its pretense of silent dialogue with the school's guidance counselor it creates the impression of literal transcription of a mother's thought processes in the isolation of performing household tasks: "I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron"(Olsen 584). Indeed, this surface level provides the narrative thread for our insights into both Emily and her mother. The mother's first person narrative moves chronologically through a personal past which is gauged and anchored by occasional intrusions of the present: "I put the iron down"(Olsen 585); "Ronnie is calling. He is wet and I change him"; "She is coming. She runs up the stairs two at a time with her light graceful step, and I know she is happy tonight. Whatever it was that occasioned your call did not happen today"(Olsen 589).
             With the narrator, we construct an image of the mother's own development. Her difficulties as a young mother alone with her daughter and barely surviving during the early years of the depression. Her painful months of enforced separation from her daughter; her gradual and partial relaxation in response to a new husband and a new family as more children follow. Her increasingly complex anxieties about her first child. And finally her sense of family equilibrium which surrounds but does not quite encompass the early memories of herself and Emily in the grips of survival needs. We also construct an image of the stressful growth of the daughter from infancy through a troubled, lonely childhood...