What are the characteristic of Emilys mother in Tillie Olsens short story “I Stand Here Ironing”?
dymatsuoka Distinguished Editor Scholar Expert Scribe $(document).ready(function() { $(‘a.toggle_expert_titles’).click(function() { $(‘#show_expert_titles’).toggle(); return false; }); }); Emily’s mother, the narrator, is a woman who has many regrets. She is loving and well-meaning, but guilt-ridden at the ways she feels she failed her oldest daughter Emily in her raising, and angry at the circumstances that caused her to do so. She was a young mother abandoned by her husband and struggling to balance working and childcare, and in looking back she second-guesses her attempts to follow the best advice she had at the time – “with all the fierce rigidity of first motherhood (doing) like the books then said” about letting her baby cry in order to nurse her on a schedule, and later sending her daughter to a convalescent home she hated because “they persuaded me at the clinic”. She acknowledges that Emily “was a child of anxious…love”, and laments that in the way she raised Emily “my wisdo
