“I Stand Here Ironing,” by Tillie Olson is a heart wrenching story of what life is like for folks trying to raise their children without the benefit of home schooling, without the benefit of our Lord.
I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron. “I wish you would manage the time to come in and talk with me about your daughter. I’m sure you can help me understand her. She’s a youngster who needs help and whom I’m deeply interested in helping.”
This mom has no dreams left for her daughter.
Who needs help,……Even if I came, what good would it it do? You think because I am her mother I have a key, or that in some way you could use me as a key? She has lived for nineteen years. There is all that life that has happened outside of me, beyond me.
And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total? I will start and there will be an interruption and I will have to gather it all together again. Or I will become engulfed with all I did or did not do, with what should have been and what cannot be helped.
Haven’t we all felt the same way?
The problem is public school, adolescence–they all conspiredd to draw this mom’s daughter away from her. “Now suddenly she [her daughter] was Somebody, and as imprisoned=2 0in her difference as she had been in anonymity.”
Imprisoned in her difference as she had been in anonymity.
Finally her mom cries,
I will never total it all. I will never come to say: She was a child seldom smiled at. Her father left me before she was a year old. I had to work her first six years when there was work, or I sent her home and to his relatives. There were tears she had care she hated. She was dark and thin and foreign-looking in a world where the prestige went to blondness and curly hair and dimples, she was slow where glibness was prized. She was a child of anxious, not proud, love. We were poor and could not afford for her the soil of easy growth. I was a young mother, I was a distracted mother. There were other children pushing up, demanding. Her younger sister seemed all that she was not. There were years she did not want me to touch her. She kept too much in herself, her life was such she had to keep too much in herself. My wisdom came too late. She has much to her and probably little will come of it. She is a child of her age, of depression, of war, of fear.
Perhaps that is what we home school parents are doing–we aree snatching our children from their “age” and offering them another “age” another “world..”
Once upon a time Karen and I raised four home schooled children. God knows that we could have been20better teachers, probably better parents. But one thing is for sure: we loved our children and in our home they found a safe place to grow up.
Walter Wanegerin argues that the most important present we can give our children is a “name.” We name our children as we raise them. Karen and I hope that we named our children “good,” “pleasant,” “precious,” and “beloved.” What names are you giving your children?
Let her be. So all that is in her will not bloom – but in how many does it? There is still enough left to live by. Only help her to know – help make it so there is cause for her to know – that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron.
We are not helpless! We serve an awesome powerful God who loves us more than we can love ourselves. At baptism he gave us a name and said it was good.
When you are ironing at the ironing board . . . think about that.