ated:I let her be absent, though sometimes the illness was imaginary. How different from my now-strictness about attendance with the others. I wasn't working. We had a new baby. I was home anyhow. Sometimes, after Susan grew old enough, I would keep her home from school too, to have them all together. (244)This shows how selfish the mother was. She wanted everyone to be home with her at the expense of their education. She let her children do whatever they wanted to. At the end of the story, Emily decides not to take her midterms. This is an example of what happens when a child is allowed to do whatever they want. Emily grows up not realizing her full potential, and is constantly robbed of the opportunity to better herself. At the end of "I Stand Here Ironing," Emily's mom acknowledges the fact that she was a bad parent. "We were poor and could not afford for her the soil of easy growth. I was a young mother, I was a distracted motherMy wisdom came too late. She has much to her and probably little will come of it" (246). Even after all that has happened, Emily's mom still stays out of Emily's life. The diction shown by Olsen suggests that even though Emily's mom realizes her mistakes, she will do nothing to correct them and continue to have very little presence on Emily's life. "Let her be. So all that is in her will not bloom-but in how many does it?" (246). The mother in Amy Tan's "Two Kinds" is vastly different than the one mentioned in "I Stand Here Ironing" by Tillie Olsen. Tan immediately begins her story saying that this "mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America" (247). She already went through hard times in China, so she knew the importance of succeeding in America. One of the main reasons I believe Jing-mei's mother is a bad model for parenting is because of the fact that she put too much pressure on her daughter to succeed. She cared so much for Jing-mei, that it eventually becam...
