"I Stand Here Ironing" by Tillie Olsen

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

And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total?

Or I will become engulfed with all I did or did not do, with what should have been and what cannot be helped.

You do not guess how new and uneasy her tenancy in her now loveliness.

You did not know her all those years she was thought homely, or seeing her poring over her baby pictures, making me tell her over and over how beautiful she had been--and would be, I would tell her--and was now, to the seeing eye.

But the seeing eyes were few or nonexistent.

I nursed all the children, but with her, with all the fierce rigidity of first motherhood, I did like the books said.

Though her cries battered me to trembling and my breasts ached with swollenness, I waited till the clock decreed.

She loved motion, loved light, loved color and music and textures. She would lie on the floor in her blue overalls patting the surface so hard in ecstasy her hands and feet would blur.

When she finally came, I hardly knew her, walking quick and nervous like her father, looking like her father, thin, and dressed in a shoddy red that yellowed her skin and glared at the pock marks. All the baby loveliness was gone.

She was two. Old enough for nursery school they said, and I did not know then what I know now--the fatigue of the long day, and the lacerations of group life in nurseries that are only parking places for children.

I knew Emily hated it even if she did not clutch and implore "don't go Mommy" like the other children

But never a direct protest, never rebellion. I think of our others in their three-, four-year-oldness--the explosions, the tempers, the denunciations, the demands--and I feel suddenly ill. I stop the ironing. What in me demanded that goodness in her?

She does not smile easily, let alone almost always as her brothers and sisters do. Her face is closed and somber, but when she wants, how fluid.

They persuaded me at the clinic to send her away to a convalescent home in the country where "she can have the kind of food and care you can't manage for her, and you'll be free to concentrate on the new baby."

They never have a picture of the children so I do not know if they still wear those gigantic red bows and the ravaged looks on the every other Sunday when parents can come to visit "unless otherwise notified"--as we were notified the first six weeks.

Each visit she looked frailer. "She isn't eating," they told us.

She fretted about her appearance, thin and dark and foreign-looking at a time when every little girl was supposed to look or thought she should look a chubby blond replica of Shirley Temple.

She was not glib or quick in a world where glibness and quickness were easily confused with ability to learn.

To her overworked and exasperated teachers she was an overconscientious "slow learner" who kept trying to catch up and was absent entirely too often.

Mostly Emily had asthma, and her breathing, harsh and labored, would fill the house with a curiously tranquil sound

Oh there are conflicts between the others too, each one human, needing, demanding, hurting, taking--but only between Emily and Susan, no, Emily toward Susan that corroding resentment.

Susan, the second child, Susan, golden and curly haired and chubby, quick and articulate and assured, everything in appearance and manner Emily was not.

She was too vulnerable for that terrible world of youthful competition, of preening and parading, of constant measuring of yourself against every other, of envy, "If I had that copper hair," or "If I had that skin..."

She tormented herself enough about not looking like the others, there was enough of the unsureness, the having to be conscious of words before you speak, the constant caring--what are they thinking of me? what kind of an impression am I making--there was enough without having it all magnified unendurably by the merciless physical drives.

What do I mean? What did I start to gather together, to try and make coherent?

Sometimes, to make me laugh, or out of her despair, she would imitate happenings or types at school.

Now suddenly she was Somebody, and as imprisoned in her difference as in anonymity.

Was this Emily? the control, the command, the convulsing and deadly clowning, the spell, then the roaring, stamping audience, unwilling to let this rare and precious laughter out of their lives.

We have left it all to her, and the gift has as often eddied inside, clogged and clotted, as been used and growing.