The Joyous Rebellion of Pockets

Walking by the lake, my daughter casually pulls a candy out of her pocket, pulls on the crinkly twists on either end, liberates the treat into her mouth, then hands me the still-sticky cellophane wrapper, which I stuff with a small thrill of pleasure into my own pocket. It will join a few coins, a pretty rock collected from the beach and a seasoning of dirt or dried flower petals plus pocket fuzz. I smile to myself, feeling slightly naughty and just a little rebellious even after all these years – it’s still liberating!

Why? Because my mother HATED pockets. To Mom, pockets represented disorganization, slovenliness, and an open invitation to dirt, disease and despair. She didn’t even like the children’s book Katy No-Pocket, the story of a kangaroo without a pouch for her joey whose problem is solved by a kind workman who gives her his work apron filled with - you guessed it – pockets.

Mom, like so many women of her generation, learned to sew all her own clothes at a young age, and went on to dress herself and all of us kids like mid-century fashion plates. She’d pounce on the Penny’s or Sears catalogs when they’d come, and pore through them page by page, carefully examining the new colors and styles for the upcoming season. You could hear her snorting in derision or sighing in satisfaction at what she found in those glossy pages. But did those store-bought wonders ever arrive at our house? Heaven forbid! Mom would sit down with pencil and ruler over brown, onion-skinned tissue paper and design her own patterns. Once a pattern was created, she was off to the fabric store (the only place she had a charge card) to find the perfect material for this new outfit if she didn’t already have fabric in her cache at home.

Once back home, coffee flowing and scissors flashing over fabric, Mom would begin to create magic. When you heard her singing, she was almost always sewing. The clothing that flowed off her sewing table was beautiful, stylish, perfectly tailored and suitable to be sold in any high-end shop in our town. These gorgeous pieces lacked only one thing: pockets.

Mom detested pockets in clothing. She knew they could be useful, but she hated the way they looked, in her words “bulging like lunch bags” from people’s hips. Her stylish, hand-made creations were NOT to be compromised with such slovenly additions. She even went “sew far” as to sew the pockets shut in the few pieces of clothing we did purchase from Penney’s. I remember begging her to let me have a pocket in a skirt once so I’d have some place to put money in case I needed to call a taxi on a date; she relented enough to put a hidden pocket in the waistband of the skirt big enough to hold two dimes. (She did relent and put smooth, flat pockets in Dad’s suits, but he “needed them because he was a man.” Never in my life did I wish so much to be a boy as when I heard that “he” could have pockets, but “she could not.)

Mom’s pocket antipathy had deep roots. Back when she was a girl, pockets in women’s clothing was considered to be completely unnecessary and even scandalous, perhaps leading women in dangerous or compromising directions. Men had pockets and carried all sorts of questionable things in them: tobacco, pipes, whiskey flasks, chewing gum – or worse! How could women, with their more vulnerable and sensitive natures, be expected not to succumb to such temptations? For their own protection, women’s clothing didn’t have pockets. Mom took this to heart – and pocket.

When I started sewing some of my own clothes as a teen, the first thing I did was put pockets surreptitiously in a few things, hoping Mom wouldn’t find them. The first pockets were small and tucked away (they always are at the beginning of an addiction), but as I grew bolder, they got bigger and deeper. I would wear something Mom had made me when going to school, but once there, my own creations WITH pockets – sometimes LOTS of them! – appeared out of the bathroom. I would stuff things into them just because I could and I felt like such a rebel. It was a frightening and an exhilarating experience.

This double-life lasted almost a year, but I got careless one day and wore home one of those contraband outfits I’d made: a pair of bib overalls with saggy pockets that looked like kangaroo pouches. One look from Mom as I walked in the front door and I knew the jig was up. I slunk upstairs to change, then slithered down to be confronted by Mom for “The Talk.”

She was surprisingly gentle and understanding about my confessed love of and need for pockets. She blamed herself for spawning this degenerate behavior in me, but was willing to work with me and we came to a compromise: I could continue to put pockets in my clothing, but I wouldn’t wear them at home while she was there. She would try not to be upset by the sight of a revealing pocket should one open in front of her. This solution, in retrospect perhaps silly, worked well for the two of us, and I followed it until I moved out to go to college.

Today I have as great a love of creating and sewing clothes for my family as Mom did, but with one exception: nearly everything I make has pockets – sometimes slouchy, baggy, or capacious – but deep, useful, wonderful pockets that can carry everything from treasures picked up on a walk to snacks, drinks, cell phones and passports as we’re rushing through an airport - pockets that snap, zip or Velcro closed in loving memory of Mom.