The Sewing Machine

The Sewing Machine

After searching stores and the internet for the perfect curtains for my kitchen and utility room I gave up and decided to make them myself. Believe it or not, it was sort of fun. I don’t sew often. In fact, I sew so little that I almost sold my sewing machine in the great-purge-of-2011 garage sale. My father bought the machine for me when I was in junior high school. He bought it from someone he knew who either owned a pawn shop, or had a connection to someone who did. I think he paid a whopping thirty-five dollars for it, but for someone as frugal as my father that was a dear price.

I was taking sewing in my Home Economics class at the time and the adage, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” was certainly applicable. The first sewing project I undertook on my new sewing machine was to re-make a pair of my father’s U.S. Navy white bell bottoms I found in his ancient footlocker in the closet under the stairs. The entire fashion foray was a frustrating fiasco. I remember staying up half the night (I wanted to wear them to school the next day) sewing and seam ripping and trying on and crying and cussing. My parents had gone to bed hours before and I cussed an adolescent blue streak, damning both the bell bottoms and the sewing machine straight to hell.

I never succeeded in re-fashioning those Navy issued bell bottoms, but I learned more in that sewing all-nighter than I learned in the whole semester of Home-Ec. I learned one must be patient to be a good seamstress. I learned following a pattern is easier than trying to wing it. I learned you cannot re-size a pair of pants just by taking in the seams. Perhaps the biggest lesson I learned that night was my parents were willing to let Miss Know It All make her own mistakes without saying, “I told you so.”

As frustrating as that first experience was I grew to love sewing on that old machine. I made clothes, cute clothes, from Simplicity and Butterick and Vogue tissue paper patterns. I made most of my college wardrobe following the fashion advice from Seventeen Magazine. The old machine followed me into my married life and I made maternity clothes and matching “sister dresses” that miraculously didn’t warp my daughters’ fashion sense.

I’m still using that old machine. Last night I made curtains out of a lightweight white canvas duck cloth that was ironically similar to the fabric in that long ago bell bottom debacle. Thank you Daddy, for giving me much more than a second-hand sewing machine all those years ago. You gave me the confidence to try new things – even if I didn’t know what I was doing. You taught me to keep trying even when I failed the first time. And, most importantly, I knew you always believed in me. Not bad for a thirty-five dollar investment.

Grandmothers

My oldest daughter celebrated her birthday last month. It is hard for me to realize that thirty-one years have passed since I gave birth to my firstborn. It is even harder to believe that a little over a month ago she gave birth to her firstborn. Thirty-one years ago I was twenty-four years old and clueless about being clueless when it came to babies. I thought I was prepared to be a mother up until the point when the nurses let me leave the hospital with my newborn. What were they thinking? We knew nothing about babies, especially this bald, big-eyed one who could twist my heart with a whimper.

The drive home from the hospital was like driving through a Bosnian mine field, there was danger everywhere. I now saw the other drivers for the idiots my father always swore they were. I couldn’t depend on traffic signals to stop the flow of oncoming cars, and even pedestrians presented peril. Were the doors locked? The elderly woman waiting to cross the street could be a crazed babynapper.

Once home I had no idea what to do with this baby of mine. Should I put her in her crib, her bassinette, her infant seat? Unable to make a decision of this magnitude I think I just held her for two days until my mother arrived. My mother, who was now a grandmother (at the ripe old age of forty-seven), knew what to do with a baby and I learned from her. Or, so I thought.

Having just been through the new grandmother experience myself, I think I can say with some authority that we grandmothers don’t know much more about babies than the new mothers. It’s been too long, and believe it or not, things change. Oh, babies don’t change – they are still cute and helpless and smell like sweet milk, and pee and poop and spit up, but their care and handling changes.

While sitting in the obstetrician’s waiting room during my daughter’s last pre-delivery appointment I read an article in a parenting magazine that reinforced just how much things have changed in thirty years. Babies now sleep on their backs. In the olden days they had to sleep on their stomachs. Dear God, if I don’t even know the fundamentals how am I going to help my daughter through the new-baby-at-home-stage like my mother helped me? Were things this different for my mother when she was my new baby salvation? I committed the rest of the doctor’s office magazine article to memory and reminded myself that my daughter was much smarter and surely more baby savvy than I had been as a first time mother.

Then it was her turn to wonder why she was allowed to leave the hospital with her infant daughter. The new parents and precious newborn arrived at their New York apartment via a taxicab. (I can only imagine the horror of that ride home from the hospital.) I was there waiting for them, waiting to be the arms of experience and knowledge for my daughter to pass her daughter into. How did I pull it off? I did what my own mother had done over thirty years ago. I took my granddaughter into my arms and silently vowed we would get through this together, and then proceeded to pretend I knew what I was doing.