‘I Stand Here Ironing’ by Tillie Olsen

“I stand here ironing and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron.”

Olsen gives us everything in the first line: the never-ending work of poverty and motherhood, the single, unpartnered I, the impossibility of explaining, the impossibility of giving what is needed, the never-ending continued attempt to give it anyway. “I Stand Here Ironing” is a mother’s agonized internal monologue in response to a well-meaning social worker’s questions about her oldest daughter. How to gather the threads of history, circumstance and harm that distorted her daughter’s life? How to explain what she could have been, might still be? It’s the way the daughter shines darkly from within this lament that breaks my heart wide open. Both social worker and mother have seen “her rare gift for comedy on the stage that rouses laughter outof the audience so dear they applaud and applaud and do not want to let her go.”

First published in Pacific Spectator, in February 1956. Collected in Tell Me a Riddle, Dell Publishing, 1956

‘I Stand Here Ironing’ by Tillie Olsen

A story for February

A love story of sorts, for Valentine’s Day. “I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron.” I often think about this story of a mother reflecting on her teenage daughter’s life in response to concerns from a teacher. How the ‘back and forth’ motion of the iron is echoed in the shape of the piece, with memories, arguments and regrets rising and falling. (“Running out to that huge school where…she was lost, she was a drop,” then “She is so lovely. Why did you want me to come in at all? Why were you concerned? She will find her way.”) How it opens and deepens with lines taking in this family and other families across Depression-era America. How it ends without resolution but instead, like ironing and other domestic tasks, concluded for now, until the next day when it will be done all over again.

First published in Tell Me a Riddle, Dell, 1961/Virago 1980, and available to read online here

‘I Stand Here Ironing’ by Tillie Olsen

The first and last lines of this story are always like a punch to the gut. In fact, I think the first line here is the greatest first line of a short story I have ever read, or in the top five at least: “I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron.” A mother recounts the life of her now (almost) adult eldest daughter and in the telling, Olsen paints the picture of an era, of single motherhood and all the attendant guilt, poverty and, of sibling dynamics. It’s incredibly moving, and a masterclass in how to write monologues.

First published in Tell Me a Riddle, Dell, 1961/Virago 1980

‘I Stand Here Ironing’ by Tillie Olsen

As if maternity gives itself to monologue, and then, Tillie Olsen’s 23-page monologue is coloured by the very impossibility of finding the time to gather thoughts:

And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total? I will start and there will be an interruption and I will have to gather it all together again. Or I will become engulfed with all I did or did not do, with what should have been and what cannot be helped.

And yet it’s the domestic scene, and this story itself, that provides the occasion for that gathering together and totalling. Elaborated over the ironing board, this is an exquisite piece of writing balancing regret, retrospect, guilt and defensiveness as the mother deliberates how she brought up her first child, her monologue rhythmed to the methodical back and forth of the iron… It’s tender and jarring and unresolved:

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.

First published in Tell Me a Riddle, Dell, 1961/Virago 1980