Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing"

Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing”

This one tugged at my heart. Being the mother of four children, I could really feel for the mother. It is hard when you have small children. My first one was four when the second one was adopted and then we adopted two more at two years apart. A mother feels stretched; she feels exhausted and tired. This story really bothered me. The mother was going from work to taking care of children and then back to work. When I began reading this reading I could not understand the first line, “I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron.” Now, I understand that as she irons she is thinking about the past with each stroke of the iron. The story follows the life of the woman’s daughter, and the regrets the woman has had due to the distance (physically and mentally) that has been placed between her and her daughter. This is all due to living in a time and place where poverty was common place. “I Stand Here Ironing,” really bothered me. It troubled me to read it. I feel the antagonist in this piece is not a person but poverty. I have always looked at the antagonist as a person, animal, or another type of living thing and not a situation. The speaker or narrator would be the woman. We seen flashbacks throught out this piece which helps us understand what the woman, daughter, and the other children went through.