THE SEWING BOX
“My mother didn’t seem to like domestic work, but sewing was different….”
In the hasty packing I did when my mother went into assisted living, I used her sewing box to store treasure: an empty wooden box painted with an orange poppy (a gift from me one birthday); a half dozen of my sister’s Special Olympics medals, embossed with the words SKILL COURAGE SHARING JOY (a tribute that applies to my mother and sister equally); the receipt for the eternity ring my father bought her for their 25th anniversary, small diamonds fixed around a plain gold band.
A little story about that ring: It was on sale for $1700, but the salesman tried to up the price. “Your fingers are too fat,” he accused my mom. “You’d need extra diamonds, and that costs more.” My mother, with her keen bargaining skills and strong sense of fair play, insisted that if the ring was offered at a certain price, the salesman had to honor that price. She won.
The receipt is dated May 5th, 1981. Back then, the sewing box was filled with different treasure—treasure I loved to sift through as a girl. Bobbins wound with every color of thread. Buttons of all colors too, and all sizes, some with two holes, some with four, one domed brass with a bas-relief crest. Envelopes printed with pictures of bright, beautiful women wearing the dresses you could make from the delicate, tissue-thin patterns folded inside. And the pin cushion—the tomato-shaped one that everyone’s mother had, with the strawberry hanging off the top; studded with pins and threaded needles, it seemed almost alive.
My mother didn’t seem to like domestic work, but sewing was different—it let her be creative, even if it was just cutting patches for our jeans into cute animal shapes. And when she was making costumes for us, she seemed joyful. The first one she made me was a flower, for my kindergarten play. I’d wanted to be a purple and yellow pansy; she made me an orange and yellow chrysanthemum, the petals decorated with crystal dewdrops. I was not a fan. But the bat costume she made me one Halloween—a black jumpsuit with wings extending from wrists to hips, topped by a hooded bat head complete with tiny bat ears—that one, I loved.
I’m not sure we ever fully know our mothers, and mine felt harder to know than most. She rarely showed her feelings. She treated her own mother with an aloofness that to me was sad; she wrote to her every week, chronicling our lives but never revealing her inner thoughts. She was not sentimental. My father once tried to take her to the desert to see the flowers in bloom, only to be told firmly, “I am not going to a hot desert with cold nights.” (She hated the cold, maybe from her childhood in Canada, where she’d grown up poor and worked as a maid from the age of 12 to earn room and board so she could go to high school.)
Now and then I’d catch glimpses of what I thought of as the real her: in the way she drove her stick-shift VW bug, darting through traffic with our St. Bernard hanging his head out the passenger window. In the way she did her eyebrows each morning (she loved their bird-wing shape but not their paleness; when she was in a nursing home and couldn't do them herself, she had my sister do them—“not too dark!”). In her love of chocolate and whipped cream (though after the ’80s liquid-protein diet, keeping svelte was a point of pride). In her stylishness, even in a T-shirt and jeans. And especially when she sewed.
My mother died in 2018. The sewing box may be the last thing of hers I’m willing to let go. It is inextricably tied to her, far more than her college degree or the teacups she inherited from her mother. It’s the household object I saw her use most. I can still see her hunched over it, rummaging for the perfect thread color. What was the last thing she sewed? Probably a button. Maybe on a shirt that’s lingering among her belongings. I could touch that last bit of sewing and not even know it. But I can touch the sewing box and remember the creativity it held and feel close to the person my mother was when she seemed most herself.
—Ann Bebensee
Ann Bebensee lives with her husband and Bernese mountain dog. This is her first published piece.