Mothers and Daughters

“The world is full of women blindsided by the unceasing demands of motherhood, still flabbergasted by how a job can be terrific and tortuous.” This quote by Anna Quindlen is very representative of the mother, who is also the narrator, in Tillie Olsen’s short story “I Stand Here Ironing.” The story is short but the writing in it is very dense, and Olsen gives the ready many facts and details useful for analyzing the journey through motherhood that the narrator takes. “I Stand Here Ironing” investigates the intricacies of the mother-daughter relationship, while also exploring the nature of motherhood and highlighting the plight of a working class woman who has five children.

The relationship between the narrator and her daughter Emily is the driving force behind the story. The mother struggles not only in raising her child, but also with her own thoughts and her poverty. As a young, nineteen year old single working mother of a newborn baby in “the pre-relief, pre-WPA world of the depression” (9), the narrator has a very difficult time supporting herself and her baby financially. She tried everything she could to spend as much time with Emily while also making enough money to survive. The narrator describes Emily as a “miracle to [her]” and is absolutely crushed when she has to leave her eight month old baby during the daytimes with a lady “to whom [Emily] was no miracle at all” (8). The narrator certainly possessed an abundance of love for her daughter and nursed her “with all the fierce rigidity of first motherhood” (6). Unfortunately for her, thanks to her poverty and the desertion of her husband when the baby was one, the mother had to send her baby to her inconsiderate husband for a year. This would not be the only time in the story that the mother’s poverty and single working status would affect her relationship with her first born daughter; in fact, this problem persists throughout the entire story. Near the end of the story, after Emily’s comical talent is discovered, the mother laments about her inability to support Emily’s dreams, saying “You ought to do something about her with a gift like that—but without money or knowing how, what does one do?” (49). Throughout the story—a story with striking similarities to the author Olsen’s own life—poverty proves to be a near-insurmountable obstacle in the mother-daughter relationship.

The development and growth of shaky and awkward relationship between Emily and her mother very closely mirrors the growth of Emily as a child and a person. The effect on Emily’s life—and on her relationship with her mom—of being abandoned twice as a child cannot be overlooked. At the tender young age of one, during the formative years of the mother-daughter relationship, Emily was sent to live with her deserter father for roughly a year’s time. When Emily returns at the age of two, her mother feels like she “hardly knew” her own daughter who now was “walking quick and nervous like her father, looking like her father thin… all the baby loveliness gone” (11). In a way, one could argue that the narrator’s daughter was no longer the young sweet baby that she loved, but rather was something different, something alien to her that she could never again fully connect with in a maternal way. As the daughter begins to age, she desires her mother’s attention, but doesn’t receive it to the extent she would like to. This is due in large part to the mother’s work that she has to take on, and she is simply unable to provide the full amount of attention that her daughter deserves. This is just one of many things that the mother regrets in her upbringing of her daughter. Throughout the story, there are countless examples of regret that the mom feels regarding her raising of her daughter, and it goes past the point of pitiful to the point of annoyance for the reader to hear a narrator whine and pity herself so much. Also mixed in with the heavy feeling of regret are excuses for the mother’s behavior, justifications for her actions, and self-assurances. After being told that she needed to smile at her daughter more, the narrator, after initially questioning herself and regretting her facial expressions towards her young daughter, attempts to appease herself by saying “I loved her. There were all the acts of love” (17).

This statement of love must be true: it obviously was a clear sign of love when the narrator abandoned her seven-year old daughter for a second time by sending her to a convalescent home, placing priority of another young daughter over Emily, and effectively shattering any hopes of creating or reclaiming a loving relationship with her oldest daughter. One crucial point of the story that may get overlooked is the author’s use of the word “love” to describe a childish crush Emily had on a boy. This stealthy paragraph is significant for two main reasons. First, the use of the word love may represent the foreignness of the meaning of love to her, if it is being used to describe her feelings for a prepubescent boy. And second, after Emily gives a long explanation of her rejection by the boy (something that Emily perceives her mother did to her) and ends by asking “Why, Mommy?” (36), she receives no answer from the mother, representing a disconnection on an emotional as well as a communicational level. The story of the development, or stunting, of the critical mother-daughter relationship is what makes this story by Tillie Olsen so fascinating and meaningful. (951)