Memoir Monday #2 - My Mother

When I first read the topic for the second Memoir Monday installment, I was a little afraid! Yes, I was! How would I ever talk about my mother?! I remembered snippets of things she did and said, I remembered flashes of looks on her face at certain moments, I remembered kindnesses when I was sad or sick, but the answer to "What was your mother like?" eluded me. I had no idea what to say.

I had started breeding myself by the time my mother and I shared a really good laugh together, a laugh about the two of us. On that day, I looked up and said to her "All of a sudden, you don't seem that much older than me." I will never ever forget how she laughed that night. How I wish I could hear that again!

My mother had a devastating stroke just when I had matured enough to want to know her.

The solution to my posting quandary came to me as I was commenting on a post of @galenkp's - he posted about the strengths he developed in childhood as a result of doing household chores, in his case splitting wood, lots and lots of wood.

My mother came alive to me in my response to his post.

My mother taught me how to sew...

...and sew I did, hours and hours on end. I made most of my own clothes. After only a short walk to the locally owned department store on Main Street of my then-bustling hometown, I would come home with a new pattern and a couple yards of cloth. Back in the day when we paid for everything by cash or check. Imagine that!

Mom and I both did all of our sewing on a very old Singer sewing machine, one that very well could have been my mother's mother's, maybe even her grandmother's. Someone had procured all the gadgets that went with that thing, especially a button-holing device that could be augmented by all sorts of other gadgets to sew zig zags, circles, monograms and other shapes. And I knew how to use it all.

My mother was very proud of my sewing skills.

At some point, Mom decided to get a more modern machine so that she could do even more cool stuff, and she gave our old machine to me. Alas for her, the new, $1000 machine didn't produce better results than that old Singer, and was complicated to use.

But lucky for me, I still have that old Singer, and a beauty it is.

That baby hasn't been used in forty four years. I still remember the last thing I ever sewed, a dress shirt for my new boyfriend, who was to become my husband and the father of my three children. It was a deep red, with buttons with sail boats on them. I worked my tuchus off on it, and it was a beautiful shirt if ever there was one. The moment I gave it to him was the last time I ever saw it, but that story is for another post.

I've carried The Singer around with me for those forty four years, unopened, gathering dust in several basements.

Let's open it right now, and see what memories come along.

Please imagine my squeal of delight when I saw these scissors!

My mother would FREAK OUT if she caught any of us using her sewing scissors for anything other than cutting fabric or threads, especially if we used them to cut paper!

That sentiment was not passed on to me, and I have ruined many a pair of expensive scissors by using them to cut paper. Those few times I have needed to cut yarn, fabric, thread, twine in the past forty years, I have had to practically saw through them to get anywhere. Here I am, thinking of my mother, and thanking her for instilling me with enough of her respect for a good pair of sewing scissors that I thought to stow a pair in this case. I hope I have the good sense to treat this scissors well.

And here we have the precious button holer, the gadget that enabled us to do all sorts of fancy things. The first picture in the post is one of the gadgets I can attach to the button holer to do ...... something! I have no idea what! I feel Mom standing over my left shoulder on that first day she showed me how to use this thing. I can smell her! Oh! I miss her now!

I wonder how many times she and I used this tape measure together, to hem something, measure a waist or a pant leg, or see if we had enough fabric left over to fashion a sash for a dress that needed a little something more to be flattering. Things were prettier then, women included, don't you think?

Take this spool of pure silk thread for instance, still on the machine from that last time I used it. This was all in the days back before mercerized cotton thread became all the rage. My mother embraced that new thread robustly, it was much easier to use, didn't snag and tangle as easily, but I find pure silk thread to be more romantic, ya know? I have gobs of old threads, generations of the stuff. The colors are gorgeous, the spools are of wood, and I go reeling back to the days when women were adept at womanly things. Now we're supposed to like doing the same things men like doing, and many of us don't know womanly from paint chips.

My mother was womanly.

Here it is, in all its glory, released from decades of neglect and disuse. This will need some repairs before I can use it again. Luckily, my hillbilly town has a sewing machine repair shop, and one that specializes in just this type of machine! I imagine legions of women, much like my mother, still sewing away in the hills. They have to get their patterns online I suppose, delivered through Amazon or some such, possibly not made of those tissue thin papers that had to be unfolded very carefully, pinned to the cloth according to the instructions, then approved by my mother before I made any cuts.

My mother taught me attention to detail.

This last shot is of the bobbin. I picked up the bobbin reverently in my left hand and wondered, very briefly, if I could even remember how to put it in under the sewing plate. Happily, I lifted the release lever automatically with the middle finger of my left hand, unerringly fitted the bobbin to its rod, and released the lever. It stuck! I did this as if the last time I did it was just yesterday. I'm pretty sure I could thread the machine without error or hesitation.

How I hope to begin sewing again! What a wonderful way to bring my mother back that would be!

Here we've come to the end of this post, which was only incidentally about my mother. Perhaps I'll add to this in another post, including pictures of her, and the memories that will come from looking through those old pictures. Now I think I could write a great many posts about her, I just needed to get started.

Thank you @ericvancewalton for these memories. I cannot thank you enough.

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This is my entry to the second week of @ericvancewalton's initiative Memoir Monday. Every week, we write to a prompt about some aspect of our lives. This week's task was to write about our mothers.

Thanks for reading, and please go write your own!

footer by our dear SilverFish, @mondoshawan

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images are all mine