Kids Do Listen, Sometimes Years Later

I don’t remember what I made, but I do remember the process.  Or at least, I remember what I disliked about it.  The measuring, the tailor’s tacks, the ironing of narrow seams.  In short, my mom tried to teach me how to sew and I really, really, didn’t want to learn.

I was the teenage daughter of an exquisite seamstress:  she made her own wedding dress.  She helped sew bridesmaid’s dresses for her sister.  She painstakingly pieced together, with her two equally talented sisters, a quilt for their parents.  My mom grew up sewing.  And thought I should, too.

My resistance was futile.  Even after my few lessons at Mom’s machine and a several year gap after, Mom bought me an inexpensive machine for me to have after I got married. It sat, literally, for years in my closet.  And when I finally dusted off the cobwebs and set it on my kitchen table, it didn’t work.  The finely tuned gears had frozen up from non-use, so the sewing machine was beyond repair.

Needless to say, I didn’t replace my machine.  Which was good because the thing sitting in my closet haunted me with the guilt of failing to love or even show an interest in something my mother cherished.  At least the cat was out of the bag, a lopsided, fraying bag, not a beautifully sewn one with matched up stripes and serged hems.

Then something happened.  A couple years ago a friend acquired a sewing machine.  It was sitting on her dining table one day when she and I joined up to practice yoga.  I was more than curious…  a real, live sewing machine!  Maybe I had been missing the boat all these years.  When I asked she said she was making bean bags, I think for a church project.  Just trying something out because she wanted to.   And hoped to someday make clothes for her toddlers.  Then another friend came in.  She took one look at the sewing machine draped with colorful fabrics and said:

I’m scared of those things.

I almost laughed because it was like the devil sitting on one shoulder and an angel sitting on the other. One was whispering, Oh, come on, give it a try again! and the other proclaiming, Remember how much you disliked sewing?  You disliked it so much you killed a machine!

Even now I’m not sure which pal was the angel and which the devil.  Because, not a week after I laid eyes on my friend’s new project my mom called.  She was getting a sewing computer (that’s right…computer) and would perhaps, by any chance, I want her old sewing machine?

I jumped at the chance.

Now this is no ordinary sewing machine.  It may not be a fancy high-tech sewing computer, but it is far from the basic thing I owned so many years ago.  Yes, that one could get a project done but I was inheriting a legendary piece of equipment.  A Bernina.  A Swiss-made Bernina.  It is that pukey shade of green made infamous in the late 1960’s/early 1970’s.  It also weighs a ton and probably could deflect bullets from a tank.  “Vintage,” eBay calls this machine.

I call it “priceless.”  An heirloom.  My mom was gifted this olive-green Bernina in 1977, when I was only six years old.  My grandmother, from whom my mother learned her fine sewing skills, found it pre-owned in a shop in Rochester, Minnesota, and gave it to Mom.  Mom’s machine at the time was a piece of crap (my words, not hers) and she really needed a reliable one.  Almost forty years later it is still running strong.

If only Bernina could talk.  She witnessed a begrudging daughter (me) being taught to make straight and zig-zag stitches by an ever-patient mother (mine).  She helped my mom make my three prom dresses and a really crazy formal for college that looked like crushed Reynolds’ Wrap.  (Really.   I’m sure my mom would have laughed her head off but dealing  with that crunchy-slippery material kept her the pro she is.)  She was the one who oversaw the stitching of miles of teal taffeta for my own wedding party.  Then years later, she and Mom made frilly dresses for my daughter, fleeces for my twin boys.  What a history.  A long life filled with floral cotton, shiny gemstone hues and feathery tulle.  Never mind her drab olive exterior.  As the wise know, it’s what’s inside that matters.  And that thrumming Swiss-made heart brought so much joy to its owner, my mom, as she stitched and gathered and hemmed.

Bernina can’t sit in a closet, relegated to an idle life in old age.  I won’t, can’t, allow that to happen.  So my husband heaves her onto our kitchen table, where she sets for weeks at a time.  Not idle.  But busy.  She still hums as I remember as a kid, hovering, knowing Mom would call me soon to fit the latest creation she lovingly made.  My first project was a covering for our coffee table.  Next, came simple pencil bags for each of my kids.  Then a pieced-together doll-sized sleeping bag , from my own pattern.  Mom was on speed-dial when I attempted to make a poufy apron for my daughter, then a matching version for the same doll.  Thankful for her wisdom, the fact that technology allowed me to send pics of my failures and successes along the way, I actually made something identifiable from a plain rectangle of cotton and a flimsy paper pattern.

When I finished the apron, my mom said:

I’m really amazed that you are doing this on your own.  It’s been years since you did any sewing.  Proud of you!  

When I told her thanks, and that some of what she taught me stuck, she replied:

It has!  But I really don’t remember teaching you that much.

She did, though.  I’ll admit I surprised myself by how much came back to me after all these years.  Which got me thinking.  It is frustrating when it seems our kids aren’t listening, when we have to repeat ourselves over and over in reminders to not leave shoes on the dining table, to brush teeth and to say “Please” and “Thank You.”  Sometimes, our efforts in parenting appear futile.  But maybe they aren’t.  Perhaps our kids really do hear us and when the circumstances are right, they will use what we have taught.

We just need to keep at it.

“Twin” aprons! (I know you were all hoping for a pic of the tin foil formal, but the only snapshot I could find was a copyrighted one…really.)