"I Stand Here Ironing"

"I Stand Here Ironing" by Tillie Olsen

This story took a while for me to get the principle or the main idea that the author was trying to express. What I got out of the story was the struggles of being a young mother and the competitiveness that siblings go through. With the mother, being that she was young, I felt that maybe she thinks she didn't raise her children right. She was having the same kinds of struggles and emotions that many single mothers have. Financial and mental difficulties plays a part on the limits that are set for a mother to raise her children properly. I noticed at the beginning of the story how the mother was saying how the baby was so beautiful and she was full of happiness. Then later on the mother had to send her baby to live with it's father's family and that caused a changed between the mother-daughter relationship. I believe that it's a crucial thing that a mother and her baby have a strong bond because it can cause setbacks between them in the future. At times while I was reading, I got confused about the ages of the daughters and at the end, I didn't really know which daughter she was refering to. In the middle part of the story, the mother was talking about how her daugher Emily had to go away to this place where they would look after her.

The mother described Emily as having low self-esteem and always downing herself and how she looked. But underneath all of that darkness lies a child who had a sense of humor and was able to make people laugh. Susan,who was the younger daughter, was the daughter who seemed to have everything going for her. When the mother started talking about how Susan had a gift and she won an award for it, I was wondering what the gift was? That confused me all the way until the last paragraph when the mother looked about on all the struggles she went through with her daughter, but I didn't know which she was talking about. The mother referred to the daughter as "she" not "Emily" or "Susan".Hmm...