My young adult son walked into my room one day and said, “Mom, will you go to the store and buy me something?”
This type of opening always makes me suspicious. He works. He earns his own money. Why do I have to buy him something? It’s not his birthday. Or Christmas.
“What do you need?” I asked, squinting at him.
“An iron,” he said. “I need an iron.”
Now, of all the words I never thought I’d hear issuing from his mouth, this was right up there with “You must be tired, let me do the dishes tonight,” and “Here’s my paycheck, I want to pay back all the money you’ve lent me over the years,” as ones I felt confident I’d never, ever hear.
To the best of my knowledge, I didn’t even think he knew what this electrical device was, being most popular in the era between fax machines and Brylcreem. Still, you learn something new every day, especially when you have children.
“We have an iron,” I told him.
“What?” he shrieked, looking nonplussed. “We have an iron?”
“It’s in the cabinet over the washing machine,” I told him. I realized he’d probably never opened that cabinet in the 18 years we’ve lived in this house, which actually makes it a brilliant place for me to hide my stash of chocolate.
This led to a deeply satisfying moment of Momhood, where I got the iron out of the cabinet, set up the ironing board (a device he’d only seen in the movies) and taught him how to iron. I warned him three times to be careful because it was easy to scorch garments accidentally. So, naturally, he immediately scorched his shirt. I took the iron away from him and finished the job myself, negating all that training, while thinking about all the times I’d wanted to iron his shirts before he went to job interviews, but he refused to let me.
He saw no reason whatsoever to eliminate clothing wrinkles before applying for a job, but every reason to do so before a date with a girl who was clearly in the top tier. Since he’d never bothered to do this before.
This was the first and last time he ever used the iron, to my knowledge. I’d dropped it once, and after that the steam function never worked again, but it didn’t much matter, since the only thing I ever use it for is ironing the wrinkles out of fabric before I sew something.
I do remember my mother seemingly ironing our clothes, sheets and whatever around the clock when I was a girl. Looking back, I’m surprised she never gave me this chore, but I suppose she didn’t trust me not to turn our clothing into patches of brown scorch marks. Plus, she gave every appearance of loving to do housework, since she spent most of her free hours doing it. I remember having to hold onto my glass of ice tea when she was in the room, to keep her from grabbing and washing it.
This could have been because my dad refused to let her get a job when we were children, and she needed something to do, since she thought it was trashy to watch daytime television. Later, after I went to high school, she got a job anyway, ignoring his ire. And, later, she also got a weekend job to save money, cleaning hospital rooms. She absolutely loved this job and kept doing it long after she no longer needed the money.
When she died, I told my brother that I wanted to put a sentence on her tombstone saying that she was “now cleaning up heaven.” She would have loved that, but my brother refused. This still makes me sad.
After I left home, I no longer felt any need to wear ironed clothing and I was especially happy when the rumpled look came into vogue. I had a couple of gorgeous, expensive dresses with pleated skirts that had to go to the dry cleaners and, here’s a tip: They charge you by the pleat. That pretty much ended my love affair with pleats.
Nowadays, I own nothing that has to be ironed or dry cleaned because I’m both lazy and cheap. I do think it’s lovely to see crisp edges and pleats on clothing, sort of like I enjoy seeing a vintage Rolls Royce drive past, knowing that it’s not something I’ll ever accomplish. Plus, if you never iron anything, you never need to worry when you’re away that you might have accidentally left the iron on.
Not only do I consider ironing obsolete, but there’s a scar on my wrist from last year, when I dropped the iron and it seared deeply into my flesh. Why would I voluntarily risk going through that again? In fact, why does the government even allow irons to be sold, considering they are hot metal with cords attached where one careless moment can seriously ruin your day? Shouldn’t they be banned, or at least sold with warning labels like cigarettes? To people age 21 and older? Think about it.