Reading Response: On the surface, “I Stand Here Ironing” seems to be a story about the narrator’s oldest daughter and her complicated upbringing and coming of age. In reality, the story hold up a mirror to the mothers own decisions and “regrets” — if we can call them that.
I had to read this story a couple times before I was able to develop a solid opinion on it. While it is simple to follow and extremely well written, it took me some time to figure out the real purpose of the story. Shifting my focus from the daughter Emily to her mother, the narrator, was when I was able to find more depth in the story. In speaking about and dissecting her daughter’s upbringing, the narrator hold up a mirror to herself and her own life during that time. She admits to many mistakes. Does she view them as regrets? The answer to this question seems as complicated as the relationship itself.
From Emily’s birth their relationship seems to have been complicated. She describes her daughter as a beautiful, happy baby. But still the way she describes her feels sterile, and a little disconnected. Saying she breastfeed her and raised her as “the books” told her too, trying her best to fit the definition of a “good” mother from the beginning. Of course, this changed when she became a single mother. This is when we start to see a lot of difficult decisions she has confronted with. It seems every time she makes a decision related to her daughter (sending her to the father’s family, sending her to the boarding school, and so on) she comes back to her changed in some way for the worse.
A moment that stuck out to me was when her daughter was at the boarding school (I think it’s a boarding school, but I’m not totally sure), and she says to her mother that “They don’t let anybody love here!” I think this is one of the actual moments that we could call a regret. That she wished she would have listened to her more in that moment, to that specific call for help. I think that we can tell she regrets this moment, as she tries to make up for it when Emily comes home. But the other moments and the other decisions, I don’t see much evidence of regret. She doesn’t
do much to try and “correct” anything. She sees her daughter pale and fragile and watches her passively continue on in that way.
As she continues to have more children, we see that her biggest confrontation with herself is time. It seems like she feels those years and that time she spent raising children. This is why when I read the story, I view it as more about herself than her daughter or the other children. Her memories of them are blurred in some moments and the at the same time there is gaps of time where she doesn’t remember much of anything. While of course she might admit it was not an ideal situation, I still don’t know if we can consider this element of the story a “regret” of the narrator. She finds the woman that her daughter has grown into to be interesting and beautiful in a way her other children are not. I think that by holding a mirror to her own decisions throughout the past, she can admit that the relationship was complicated (and remains so), but that she still wouldn’t change it, no matter what other people might think or expect of her.
Coming to Age 