Sewing up the Past

I am 6 or 7 years old, the air is stale filled with dust, moth balls, and cotton fabric, I am sitting on the floor between the racks of fabric in the tenth store my mom has dragged me into. I am bored and rather be playing on the block instead of spending time in fabric shops on my Summer breaks, weekends, or anytime my Mom found an extra minute. If you couldn't guess, my mom was a Creative and her main outlet was making clothes, clothes for me and my sisters as well as herself. As a child watching Saturday morning cartoons the sound of mom's sewing machine blazing in the other room was a constant. The older we got the less, we girls, wanted to wear a home creation over a designer one. As any good(typical) daughter I tried to seperate myself from home and traditions of sewing (which my mom would have loved to pass on) to carve my own way and that meant not doing things my mom thought I should. Ironically, that didn't last long because by the end of High School I wanted to go to design school and make clothes my career and my Mom said 'No'. She, like all immigrant parents, wanted her children to become professionals which meant medicine, law, or banking. I was more like my mom then she would have liked, she wanted it as a hobby/skill for entertainment I wanted it as a career. After all the arguing and parental guilt, I did what she wanted and got a degree in Economics. The day after graduation, I showed her my degree, Suma cum laude, top of my class and I've spent everyday since making a living in one form of creative enterprise. Looking back I was defiantly living the life she didn't want for me and I hope she was proud of me but I never asked. I don't remember my mom ever showing me, formally, how to sew until now. I guess I was always learning when I was watching her. I would get up for a snack and walk into her sewing room to see what she was up to. I’d see her Mcall patterns organized and in order of her next project with fabric swatches, threads and zippers or buttons attached to the pattern in little ziplock bags. She would plan and envision what she would be working on next when she had time to herself, away from her husband and three girls which she cooked and cleaned for. For years, she’d lay yards of fabric out and pin the brown tissue sheets of Mcall pattern paper over the fabric and with the biggest Shears I ever saw would cut out the pieces of the fabric into all these weird shapes (I thought). I’d go back to watching movies, studying, or whatever. I didn’t think I was that interested, it was just something my Mom did like my Dad in the garage: cutting, carving, hammering. When I was a kid, I’d walk through spaces watching my parents working on their projects, alone, and I know remember I was always interested in what they were doing, what’s it gonna be? What's it gonna look like when it’s done? As most pestering children, they shood me away and I got used to staying out of the way until I found friends, boys, MTV to keep me away.

Fast forward to the year that changed everything, including taking my parents. The year is 2020, my parents have been retired for sometime, moved to the South for warmth and sunshine. They came up every summer to visit, mostly summer, because they had enough of the Northeast winters but they also made one or two Christmases. This time they were forced to stay, the pandemic made sure of that. The pain, shock and deep sadness from the lost was heightened by the isolation. What do I do now?

Well, the next right thing was to go back home, my childhood home, which was now what they used as a vacation home when in the Northeast. I have to go through decades of belongings, collectibles, and stuff. The stuff that they never got rid of. Each item I would pick up, the question to come up was : Will this help keep their memory alive/keep them with me ? I felt like I was curator to a kind of shrine to my parents. I wanted to keep the best parts of them. I wanted them to feel like, if there is a such thing as life after, that I kept some of their favorite things for them. In my grieving, I imagined that the things could be a touchstone or lighthouse for them to find their way home. Sounds weird when I say it out loud. In all this purging, my mom’s sewing kit and her giant pair of rusted shears that were buried away is discovered. “I remember these”, I said to my sister. In every corner of the house I would find the things that have fallen into disrepair from years of neglect and the question I kept asking myself : Will this keep her with me? I’ve said "Yes" to that question more than I should. I realize how relatable the people on Hoarders are at this moment and then I tell myself if I make it into a beautiful rainbow display (shout to the "The Home Edit") it becomes Art, right?! #itsasystem. I have hundreds of yards of her fabric that I’ve painstakingly organized by color, 1000’s of feet of elastics, grosgrain, and lace, bags of zippers and buttons. This is my ongoing conversation with my mom, don't think my Dad is left out he has his own pile but this is my project with her.

You see I want her back, I want her to teach me her sewing tricks and techniques. I, actually, do believe in a life after and I will pull out one of her Mcall patterns, repair the rusted shears and my mom and I will sew together for the first time. I believe we have enough material for years to come.