Sicilian housewives do. They iron all their towels and underpants as well, apparently.
My mother-in-law, aka The Godmother, dropped in yesterday afternoon. Despite our tense relationship, we have found an uneasy truce, based on the fact that she finds ironing so relaxing she is willing to do mine when she has run out of her own.
My own idea of relaxing is to eat chocolates and drink red wine while watching TV, but The Godmother doesnât let me relax while she is busy relaxing. She assigns me tasks.
Yesterday, she decided to teach me how to iron properly for myself. Using her iron.
First she made me gather up the dry laundry. I pottered about sorting it into two heaps; one Mount Everest of things that needed ironing; and a Mount Etna that I could fold and put away.
The Godmother popped over to check, and pointed out that I had committed another of my gross domestic blunders. Everything needs ironing!
âWhat, even towels?â I dared to ask.
The Godmother thought I was just saying this to make her laugh.
She rolled up her sleeves.
âI’ll show you the best way to iron,â she offered enthusiastically. âI have a personal ironing technique which can flatten anything.â She picked up all the clothes and reunited them into a single heap.
I wondered whether to tell her that in England we avoid ironing our jeans because the few people who walk round with a crease down the front of a pair of Levi’s are simply marking themselves out as illegal immigrants, indeed, that in England we think people who iron their jeans or T-shirts are sick and wrong, and must be stopped. I also wondered what she would think if I told her there was no need to iron her sonâs pants because he pressed them nice and flat himself with the warmth of his own buttocks as soon as he put them on. If I were a braver person I might also have mentioned that I preferred his pyjamas nice and wrinkly and, really, I was the only person he was supposed to impress when dressed in them.
In the end, I was afraid to tell her, so I remained silent.
When I was a financial analyst, I calmly met the directors of listed companies which had revenues of millions of pounds a day, and I was not afraid to tell them they were making mistakes in the way they ran their companies and should change a lot of things. If I believed a man was not handling his assets to their best advantage, I set him straight. If I thought someone’s gross margin was pathetic, I said so.
Now, as an apprentice Sicilian housewife, I was standing opposite The Godmother and she was telling me to iron her son’s underpants, and I was too scared to say no. I obeyed.
The Godmother should not really be frightening as a person. She is about a foot shorter than me (albeit two feet wider) and she is old and wrinkly as well. It is just that she has eyes that look as if she could make streaks of lightning come flashing out of them at will, and reduce any adversary who refuses to wash their face again, and do it properly this time, to a smoking heap of ashes. And those shovel hands of hers were simply created for spanking. I am quite sure one solid slap on the botty, from her, could actually send a fully grown male, even one who routinely eats frittola, into low earth orbit.
(By the way, for an explanation of frittola, click here:
http://siciliangodmother.blogspot.it/2012/02/fast-food-in-palermo.html)
Her patented ironing technique involved heating the iron to a temperature that could smelt many types of metal ore, and then release a full litre of water vapour into the atmosphere, via the fibres of the offending wrinkly garment, with each push of the ‘steam’ button.
Her iron was no normal iron. It was attached to a large tank which continually refilled it with water via a flexible hose and featured a control panel allowing her to adjust the water temperature and pressure, the iron temperature, the steam squirting rate and many other variables I would only have thought relevant to a space shuttle.
Whilst she twiddled the dials and gave me a stream of enthusiastic explanations, I am ashamed to say my mind wandered. It does have an inconvenient tendency to go meandering off on its own, without its owner’s permission, from time to time.
The Godmother and I define ourselves in different ways, I realised.
Donât we all have things weâve done, or things we do, that we feel are the essence of our personality? I think those are the things by which we want others to judge us. For me, my degree in Classics, my career as a financial adviser, the fact I have travelled to many countries and have friends from all over the world â these are some of the things that make up the woman I want other people to see.
Iâm a housewife now, but itâs just what Iâm doing, itâs not who I am. I call myself âThe Sicilian Housewifeâ as a joke, you see. I only want to be a housewife the way Marie Antoinette wanted to be a shepherdess. I donât actually want to be good at it.
The Godmother defines herself as a lifetime professional housewife. If a member of her family is wearing something a bit creased, if anyone doesnât like something sheâs cooked for them, if thereâs a speck of dust on her kitchen floor, she feels like a failure as a person.
Most Sicilian women seem to be like her. They tell you how much stuff theyâve ironed, or describe what they made for dinner last night, by way of conversation. It took me a long time living in Sicily to realise that theyâre showing off.
They cannot understand why I donât want to compete. I would far rather spend an hour helping my son to practise reading than pressing his pants. Iâm happy for him to have mud on his backside, so long as heâs having fun. If my floor is dusty but Iâve spent the morning reading a volume of George Vancouverâs diary describing the tribes of north Western Canada, I feel utterly fulfilled as a human being.
Well, the result of my philosophical reverie was that I nearly casseroled my hand, while it was still attached to my arm, by pressing the âeject gusts of vapour at a temperature hotter than the core of the sunâ button instead of the âstart super-cooling down to ambient temperature over the course of the next four daysâ button.
Whilst I nursed my hand with a bag of frozen peas, The Godmother attacked a ribbed jumper.
âIâll get all those nasty ridges out of this in no timeâ she said. She then proceeded to press my jumper so vehemently that by the time she had finished with it, it did indeed no longer have any ridges. It was no longer a ribbed jumper. It was smooth, and four feet wide.
After that she pressed the towels till they were as thin and absorbent as muslin, melted the elastic on all my knickers, and removed the cartoon characters off the front of my sonâs T-shirts by making them simply atomise at the temperature of a red dwarf. I was getting scared she might decide to iron me next. Seriously, I was panicking.
Luckily, she felt relaxed enough to stop at that point, and permitted me to put everything away.
Maybe I could interest her in extreme ironing next? I think that might be her ideal sport.
Here’s the official website:
And I stronly recommend the largest exteme ironing gallery on the Internet (from which I pilfered that photo of a hunk in a crevice):
http://slices-of-life.com/2011/07/24/the-largest-extreme-ironing-gallery-in-the-world-75-pics/
Extreme ironing involves carrying an ironing board to the most inaccessible places on earth, such as the top of Mount Everest, and doing some ironing there.
I wonder if The Godmother would find that relaxing?
The Dangerously Truthful Diary of a Sicilian Housewife 
The ‘Godmother’ sounds formidable. I have genuinely had three irons explode on me at various points in my life. I’ve only ironed about five times so this is an alarming hit rate.
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Now that’s impressive! If I could manage that just once, I’d use it as the perfect excuse to never do any ironing again đ
So far the only appliance I’ve blown up was a Gaggia espresso machine. There’s no upside to doing that.
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LOL, that is so true!! How many times have I stood in admiration next to Elena when she ironed her sons socks!! Thanks this article livened up my evening (and I do like ironing)
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lol! so true! my mother-in-law looks like your godmother!! when she comes to france, she needs to iron everything and almost makes me guilty because i don’t iron baby clothes…(i actually iron nothing…apart when it is REALLY necessary!)
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I remember watching The Godmother ironing a heap of about twenty bibs when my son was a baby. He managed to dirty about five of them in the space of 30 minutes. Even that didn’t put her off, so I’m sure nothing will!
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OMG, the Godmother would be so disgusted by me! I suck at ironing and prefer your former habit of never ironing jeans or t-shirts. Business clothes are left in the capable hands of the drycleaners. I’ve tried and get creases in all the wrong places!
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I think I iron about once a year and I’m perfectly at peace with this. I remember sitting at a playground in Grottaferrata listening to a Nonna explaining how much baby clothes she had ironed that very morning. At the time I thought she was joking, but I quickly realised she was dead serious. That scared the bejesus out of me.
This made me snort out my tea through my nose: ” I only want to be a housewife the way Marie Antoinette wanted to be a shepherdess. I donât actually want to be good at it.”
You now owe me a washing of a pair of pants. đ
This made me suspect we might be twins separated at birth: “If my floor is dusty but Iâve spent the morning reading a volume of George Vancouverâs diary describing the tribes of north Western Canada, I feel utterly fulfilled as a human being.”
Because, that? Fuck, yeah.
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Right, I’ll wash your pants for you, but who shall I get to iron them? The Godmother, the pole dancer, or this guy here:
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If you’d be so kind as to send over that climber-guy to do the ironing, I wouldn’t completely hate it…
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He’s ironing his parachute on the top of Ayers rock at the moment, but I’ll send him over by microlight as soon as he’s finished đ
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So true, my Sicilian mother in law irons all my clothes when we visit her in the summer including pants and socks. Mrs Sensible (my wife) will iron but does not like ironing very much. She has become a little English about it.
We have solved the problem of ironing by inviting workaways http://www.workaway.info/ to come and stay with us a do the ironing.
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Wow, a tourist-cum-slave to do the housework. That sounds fantastic!
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It works very well, they are supposed to be a workaway and provide a maximum 5 hours of work a day for food and lodgings, but my wife treats them like a guestaway I normally find my wife and the guestaway sat watching DVD’s and chatting while I hang the washing .
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Ha ha haaaa!!! Maybe you should open a B&B instead? So at least the Guestaways pay you for your efforts?
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Damn, that’s pretty funny, so are the extreme ironing photos!! If I need to iron something I toss it back into the dryer.
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I am late to this party, but… I was visiting my mom-in-law (age 93) who used to be a fairly assiduous housewife back in her day. (She always brought scouring powder with her whenever she visited us and set to scrubbing the kitchen sink before she would even unpack her bags. Of course I HAD scrubbed ALL the sinks in the house just before her visit but it didn’t matter at all.) Anyway, she has not been feeling up to much lately and asked me to maybe iron a few things from her full ironing basket. Well, I seldom iron anything anymore myself, but I gave it a shot. I thought my skills had seriously eroded but it was really the iron – which, it turns out, she had actually pulled out of her other son’s trash bin, where he had tossed it because it was so bad, After trying hard to smooth a few items with the useless thing, I took the rest of the garments down the hall to the laundry room, added a couple of dampened towels to the dryer load and got the wrinkles out that way – as I always do at home. She was amazed that it worked. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she re-irons each garment before wearing it, Ha-ha. She is not even Italian. Go figure,
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Oh, that dampened towel tip is great! I will do all my ironing that way from now on!!!! Thank you!
The scouring powder anecdote reminded me of my sister, who once came over and scrubbed my kitchen sink like a maniac and then said, “I’ve got all that melted cheese off the bottom of the sink,” …. but it wasn’t melted cheese, it was silicone mending a huge crack. So the sink leaked after that!
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My wife’s mother was southern Italian. Even though “son-in-law” seems to rank higher than “daughter-in-law” on the Godmotherly scale, I remained afraid of her 4 ft. something presence, which somehow, loomed. I’m only surprised you didn’t volunteer to iron the Kleenex!
You’ve the writer’s gift along with numeracy but if I may be permitted a small correction: The woman pictured ironing cannot be an Italian; she’s obviously Polish!
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Polish. Heee hee hee hee!! I love it!! đ
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gosh, I thought someone would write a post about ironing SOCKS and you have!!!! đ đ
yes my Mum taught me to iron everything, socks, jeans, underwear, towels, vests, just anything that does not move!!! that’s the Italian way !!! (but PLEASE don’t tell her that I don’t do it any more…
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But doe she iron everything for you when she comes to visit?!! I think that seems to be the way of real Italian Mammas, right?
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yes she used to… lasciami fare qualcosa, lo faccio volentieri…. and after 6 hours she was still there ironing. I would come home after work and discover clothes which I had completely forgotten I had….. AND she was ironing all of Mr C’s socks!! Now I hide the iron when she comes…I’d rather she goes out for a walk…:) đ
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I don’t know why I get all these exclamation marks in my reply to your posts……sorry not intended. Any tecchie out there who can explain?
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You are hilarious! I bumped into this blog by pure chance and am so happy to have found it! As an Italian I actually fled the country to avoid everything you describe so well! Keep up the fight: mediterranean housewives badly need some perspective đ
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Glad you enjoyed my blog!
I am gradually having a subversive influence on all the Italian housewives, mocking them for their ironing obsessions etc – I think there will be a social revolution here soon!
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I seriously enjoyed this and had a good laugh! Mother’s are the best â¤
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