Love and Gratitude on Mother’s Day

Mom, do you remember when Aunt Helen gave me an iron for Christmas? She had caught wind of me saying that I didn’t own an iron and probably never would. Instead of putting my name on the outside of the package, she wrote “it’s time.”
I donated that new iron a week later to the local homeless shelter. Learning that probably doesn’t surprise you. It didn’t matter that I was done with college, working in a job that required a tie, and still bringing my laundry to your place during visits.

For the last decade, I have avoided the iron. That’s until Sarah needed one. We bought it together. Bought a board too. I still refused to iron though. Sometimes, I plucked shirts from the closet, made a sweet face, and handed them to Sarah as she zipped the iron across her black work shirts. Other times, she flatly insisted because my shirts were a mess of wrinkles.

I’m just repeating an old pattern, Mom. During my trips home after washing a load, you often asked if you could iron the dress shirts that were in the pile. I protested, but you weren’t really asking. You simply opened the broom closet, retrieved the ironing board, and expanded its creaking legs.

You set up shop in the kitchen while I leaned against the sink. Just like the picture from my childhood on those nights after you were home from work and the dinner dishes were tidied. Fitted shirts hung from the hinges and knob of the broom closet because the rack at the rear of the ironing board was full.

With the collar turned up, you nosed the iron from button loop to button loop. Next were the cuffs, each one slack like a gaping mouth until the iron set their jaws straight. I didn’t notice then that you started with the small pieces of the garment.

It just seemed that you held out for the shoulders and body, the larger passes when the iron ticked, hissed, and then recovered with a hungry inhalation, the shirt draped around the board, moving full circle from chest to back to chest.
The sleeves were last. The sleeves on my white shirts, sleeves that brushed against your hand at your father’s funeral, that extended for the heavenly host at confirmation, that hid beneath a robe at graduation, and that encircled your waist on the dance floor at my brother’s wedding. Sleeves with sharp creases from seam to cuff. Once a week for years, you spent hours at the ironing board-just one of those tasks that fell to you in the patterns of marriage.

I’m not even sure if there was a discussion, but one day it just happened: Dad carrying in shirts covered with a dry cleaner’s plastic garment bag. Sarah and I didn’t talk about it on that Sunday afternoon when I opened the closet.
I pressed the hinge on the board and watched the legs slip from the top. I lined my shirts up and imagined us in the kitchen.

Sure, mom, I pressed some folds in the fabric and had to go back and straighten them. Yes, I forgot at first to start small and went after the big patches of wrinkles that marked the back. Sure, the iron felt clumsy in my hands. Yes, it took so long to press eight shirts that the iron timed-off before I was done.

But you should have seen me focused on those shirts… instead of dreaming about what would be better at that moment or fooling myself with the notion that a busy person is a content person. I was happy. Just me, the shirts, a sunny afternoon, and a better sense of sacrifice.

Not what you lost over the ironing board, but what story you pressed in. Not what you wear on your back, but what responsibility a back should bear. Not what you smoothed at the surface, but what you shaped into being.
Love and gratitude on this Mother’s Day.