SEW GOOD
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My mother is an artist and if she had been encouraged in her younger years, who knows where her talent would have taken her. Being creative, her gift reached to many different genres. She was a painter, a sculptor and a seamstress, among other things. It was this last facet of her outlets that I have begun to think about.
She was an excellent seamstress, always making me dresses and pillows and smocks. Curtains for my room, skirts for a makeshift vanity table. She was always making me something from the time I can remember until I was about nine years old.
I remember her staying up late at night, listening to the snip of the scissors on the tissue paper patterns and the fabric laid out on the kitchen table, the whirr of the Singer. In the morning there would be more skirts, more pillow covers, more home made stuff. I wanted none of it.
“Why can’t you buy me a dress” I would whine.
“Why do you have to make all this stuff, its so stupid. I don’t want it.”
I didn’t appreciate the effort and just the sheer time commitment it had taken to create these works of art and expressions of love.So she stopped. She stopped creating and what obviously came from her heart and moved on to different things. She stopped. I don’t think she made home made things for my sisters, either. I unknowingly had cheated them out of heirlooms and remembrances.
Now that I’m a mom myself, I am painfully aware how our children say things that are hurtful to us, and they don’t even realize it. Backhanded remarks and whispered comments that they think I don’t hear. I forgive them as I know my mom has forgiven me. But at the time, they hurt. Deeply.
I don’t think my mother would even take the time to make me something now if I had asked. She’s 74 years old and going strong, running her own business and in touch with people who truly appreciate her creations. She certainly wouldn’t have time to sit down and sew.
But every now and then, I wish she could make me a pillow cover or a dust ruffle for my bed. I miss the spontaneity of waking up and seeing something home made, just for me. I also realized I never said thank you.
So thank you, ma, for all the stuff you did for me and how I never said thank you, but you made them anyway.
Thanks for being my mom.
