Susan Orlean Admits To Becoming Her Mother Since Becoming A Mother
Susan described to the audience coming home from school to find her mother preparing hors-d’oeuvres made of precious cubes of Velveta cheese. While other little kids hurriedly packed their trunks for summer camp, Susan would open her own to find all her clothes neatly folded and ironed. Her mother, she says, had never drunk a cup of coffee in her life. She had never smoked a single cigarette and drank “only about every eight months at a wedding,” Susan remembered.
Growing up, Susan says that she longed for a slightly less pristine mother who perhaps resembled Endora from Bewitched. More relaxed in demeanor with curlers in her hair and perhaps a small cocktail.
After her son was born, Susan didn’t bother to purchase an iron. Compared to how she grew up, Susan says that she is raising her son “like a wolf.”
“I didn’t own an iron which was part of the Endora movement,” she laughed.
But as of late, Susan has felt compelled to purchase an iron and has slowly found herself to be ironing — what else — but her son’s underwear. Now when he tears through his dresser drawer, she says that she rushes to fold back those neatly ironed undies with the same breathlessness that her own mother did. Although slightly horrified, she sighed and confessed her six-word memoir on becoming a mother, “I have begun ironing his underpants.”
(photo: nyu.edu)