When I was raising children, I tucked into home and domesticity and chore charts and making a good loaf of bread right about the time all the women my age were going back for advanced degrees, getting big fancy jobs and denigrating those women who stayed at home. Yes, people like me.
I spent a lot of years making all my children's clothes, sewing for friends and this post from a blogger, writing about her children's flannel nightgowns, triggered lots of sewing memories for me. I've cooked (and have lots of recipes to show for it), cleaned, sewn, quilted and now that there is a veritable explosion of blogs posting about these things, I'm sort of out of steam, out of energy, and yes, out of sync. So many bloggers and "sewists" (that's the new term and it still sounds strange to me) are creating and posting all those things I know how to do--and DID--while I'm grading papers and doing lesson plans at my definitely un-fancy job at the local community college.
On a somewhat related note, I've been thinking a lot about how thin I've spread myself in my creative world. There's even a book about people like me--who like to do lots of things all at once. I think it can best be summed up in this quote I have stuck on my cabinet near the computer:
Much of what I read in the blogosphere reminds me of all I used to accomplish in my sewing/creative life, and all that I cannot now do. Whether I like it or not, those doors are closed to me now. I won't be stitching up batches of nightgowns, or sewing this or that. I just don't have the time/energy/vision/youth that is required for all of that. I have to choose, now, and that is something new (and I have to say) rather unwelcome to me. I'd rather have all that hope and promise of my thirties--when the world was all new, untested, ready for me to try and do anything--like all these young women bloggers with their blogs.
I suppose I need to tap into the blogs of the fifty-somethings rather than the thirty-somethings, and see if they have something interesting to say. And while I just don't want to hang out with Premature Door-Closers (or become one myself), there is an elegance to streamlining a life, of bubbling it down to its core--and its creative--essentials. Of figuring out what I want to be as I grow up.
3 comments:
But more than that you sew'd our memories. You are in every good thing that I can remember as a child. Just because now you are on a different road, different direction doesn't mean that the things you did back then are gone, because they are not! Keagan's sweet things that we make stemmed from you. So maybe you have something that all those other blogs don't: memories that are being passed on to the next generation. Never underestimate the things that I hold so close, because they are the things you taught me while being a mom, going back to school and securing a place in life. Way to go mom! and ps: please 'will' me all the quilts because you have more talent in your little pinkie then I have in my WHOLE entire body and I want them to remember you by:) Thanks. (don't worry I won't tell the boys... oh wait... nah, they don't read blogs :)
Love the post, and love Barb's comment, too. You can still read my blog. I haven't sewn for a decade. Oh. Maybe that's why my blog is so boring.
It seems a bit backward, doesn't it, to be picking up a "career" (and I use the word quite loosely) in our post-children years? I do miss the sewing and cooking and crafting or my children-years. Every now and then, it's nice to go back for a visit.
I LOVE Barbara's phrase that you "sewed her memories." Beautiful. She has learned a bit of word crafting from you along with sewing and cooking.
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