Here is a link to the story for anyone interested:
http://members.multimania.co.uk/shor...enironing.html
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.”
“Who needs help.” — Even if I came, what good would 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....
Rest above.
Here are the "themes" from wikipedia:
The story is about motherhood and mother-daughter relationships. It is also about the various influences that shape a developing child. It is also about the difficulties faced by working-class women in the U.S. in the 1930s, when the economy collapsed. The story explores the extent to which the mother can be held responsible for her daughter's problems, and suggests that society must also take some responsibility for forcing a young, single mother into an impossible situation, and then providing her with bad guidance (for example, Emily's mother does not want to send her away to a sanatorium, but the medical profession/social workers insist it would be better for the child.) The story suggests that "the experts" were wrong, but the mother did not feel confident enough about her own instincts to dare to challenge them.
Sounds like nuclear war to me.
