Tracy Baran’s photograph of a mom ironing and Tillie Olsen’s story “I Stand Here Ironing” coincide in several ways. They are both about a mother and a daughter. The mother seems to be deep in thought in the photo just as she is in the story. By looking at the photograph, the reader does not know what the mother is thinking, but you can tell that she is deep in thought. At my first glance of the picture, I saw a hard-working mother and a lazy daughter. The daughter’s lack of concern for housework seems to make the mom frustrated by. The daughter looks unappreciative of all that her mother has done for her. The daughter is sitting around biting her nails while housework piles up around her. You can see that there are more clothes that need to be folded and ironed, but the daughter does nothing to help. The shelves look jam packed and dirty. There is trash scattered about the floor that needs to be picked up, and yet the daughter sits and does nothing.
The story sheds a completely new light to what is going on in the photograph. Maybe the mother is not frustrated with her daughter, but she is frustrated with herself. She may think that if she could have done more for her daughter, then her daughter would not act in the lazy way that she does. The mother in the story worked extremely hard for her daughter. When the girl’s father left, the mother did everything she could to make ends meet. The mother begins looking back on their lives as she irons. She thinks about these things when her daughter’s school contacts her about her daughter’s behavior. She begins looking back on their lives. She feels as though she has nothing left to do for her daughter. She thinks she has been insignificant, when she has actually done everything.