In response to question six on page 615 in regard to love and friendship, I chose to examine the stories “I stand here ironing” and “Sweat” as they pertain to the posed question. They seem to both show drastically different types of love, the love between lovers and the love between family members, but they also display similar elements that are universal with such strong feelings.

 In “I stand here ironing”, the mother clearly believes that she loves her daughter and feels that, while she did make some mistakes, she did the best that she could do out of love, in the hopes of getting the best life possible for her daughter. However, in the way she writes and talks about her daughter, she seems almost afraid of her. She shows the sort of fear that only comes through uncertainty, in not knowing something’s bounds and being unable to square it away and understand it. As she describes how she’s interacted with and treated her daughter through her life, she seems to show a kind of timidity towards loving her daughter. Though it’s never elaborated on, the mother seems almost afraid of being lost in her daughter, whom she regards as amazingly talented, almost seeming to outshine her in all that she is.

Being a young mother, she still had much of her life to go on with and an identity of her own to create, it seems as if she wasn’t yet prepared to give herself up to become “Emily’s Mother” and less of her own person at the point she was at in her life. As the other children came about and she became more accustomed to being a parent (along with many of the earlier trials in her life being alleviated with the new marriage and children of better health), she seemed less afraid to simply love and accept her children’s quirks, all of which she regards as special, but not as remarkable as her first daughter. The mother in this story views love as doing what’s ultimately best for the person and wishing them well. While she may not have shown her love for her daughter, she still seems to feel that she loved her to the best extent that she could, as by the end of the day, everything worked out well enough anyway.

The kind of love written about in “Sweat” is completely different, more raw and passionate, showing that the lines between love and hate really aren’t so concrete. Delia is a strong woman, and has been all her years. From a young age, she fell in love with a man who charmed and married her, though the romanticism wore off quickly. For Sykes, love was a sort of game, something to chase for the fun of it. To him, love was a pursuit, full of fanciful words and acts to get someone close to you, mostly for your own satisfaction. He never seems to show any true form of affection or care towards the people he claims to have loved, Delia and Bertha, usually only sweet-talking women so he can have his own form of fun, using love, lies, bragging, and threats to get the women to like, or at least obey, him. Delia’s view of love is much more hopeful, but she seems resigned to her fate that she can no longer find that sort of idealized love this far in her life.

Despite their relationship being flawed, she did love Sykes through the marriage, and for many, many years. She never describes it out of marital obligation, but out of passion and love that she took his years of beatings and abuse, that she took herself to the washboard and laundry week after week to support herself and him through his years of uselessness and his blatant lack of care for her or her wellbeing. That same passion that lived within her for years out of love for him later turned over to hatred, once she opened her eyes to the fact that he was not going to ever change and that he would only make her miserable until she died.  To Delia, love is more of a whirlwind, a tornado that sweeps you up and takes you along. Once she changed how she looked at her husband, it was simple enough for the passion in the winds to take a turn. Though she still harbored feelings of love for him by the end of the story, the death of Sykes was also a final, freeing death of her marriage, setting her heart free of the tornado that carried it through their relationship, through love and hatred.