Hemming (and Hawing...)

“Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.” 
― Mark Twain

 Greetings Dear Ones!

Before we begin, forgive me, but I must ask… Is there not some better use for your time right now?  Is there something you are putting off doing? Shouldn’t you be mowing something, sorting something, or color-coordinating something? Is your electric bill paid? At the very least, maybe you should be exploring that junk drawer in the kitchen and asking yourself why you have so many dry-wall screws, mystery keys, and rubber bands IN A KITCHEN, for heaven’s sakes! Seriously…What gruesome little chores are you escaping through your feigned interest in stitch-witchery and sheep dung?  

Don’t feel bad if reading this blog is your form of procrastinating.  I’ll let you in on a little secret:  I too am Procrastinating RIGHT NOW! PRO-crastination.  Whatever “Crastination” is, I’m all for it!  Especially if it means I can put off removing all the skin dander from this man’s jeans for a few more moments. What do Mr. I’ve-been-on-Keto-for fifteen-days, Ms. I-just-discovered-hot-yoga and Mr. I-just-had-a-bypass-and-got-close-enough-to-mortality-to-smell-it’s-breath have in common?  Between the three of them, they have no less than 27 pairs of jeans that have to be taken in at the waist and tapered all the way through the seat—through all those many yards of decorative top-stitching that is such a pain in the arse to remove and never looks right again no matter how we try to replicate it.  So this is a marvelous distraction from that…

I have been meaning to write about Procrastination for some time now; I just haven’t gotten around to it. If the good citizens of the Land of Procrastination ever got their act together enough to elect a Queen, it would probably be me. And, honored though I would be, I probably would arrive late to the coronation. No one knows more than I about the fine arts of Procrastination. I have been known to sit down and knit an entire sock just hours before hosting a sit-down dinner for forty people, with not so much as a carrot in sight. I could never get as much slacking done if I wasn’t also capable of extreme efficiency occasionally. 

Ever since I wrote an entire college Honor’s Thesis in less than 75 hours (straight through two nights) thirty years ago, I have been telling myself I need to get a handle on my habits around Procrastination. Soon. Well, Someday…. The Good News is that this habit, maladaptive as it is, has served me well.  I almost always manage to get away with it.  It allows me to front-load my life with a myriad of things I don’t really want to be doing, and still get the Big Stuff done too. Mostly. Except when it doesn’t.  But the steep price I pay is chronic anxiety.  The inversion of “Playing first” and “working later” means that the playing never actually feels like playing.  It comes with a bitter side-dish of guilt.

People scoff and say “You? Procrastinate? Tosh! You’re the busiest person I know!”  Well, ladies and gentlemen, that’s because I am also the sneakiest. Sneaky procrastinators look the busiest. It’s one of the ways we manage to get out of having you dare to ask us to do more.  I tried to get a jumpstart on this Blog last night but instead trolled Ebay for green Doc Martens, juggled the emotional, spiritual, and physical needs of three elderly incontinent Jack Russells, spun some alpaca fur, and tried to remember a fiddle tune I learned three weeks ago.  Then I decided to “Get Serious.” This means I ate all the lime gelato in the freezer because “I work best when I am not hungry.” Then I decided to have a nap because “I work better when I am fully rested.”  Then I decided to go mend the fence where the sheep keep escaping because “I work better when they aren’t trampling my Iris patch and devouring the Rhubarb” (which is toxic to them).  (I definitely work better when I am not having to call the Vet!)  And so it went…. I carefully and thoroughly made all the Appropriate Adjustments so that I could bring you My Very Best Work. Finally, all conditions were Prime. But I was exhausted.  So I went to bed.  After all, I definitely write better in the Morning…

Why do we procrastinate? (Admit it, you’re still at it right now!) Is it because we are just total Slackers? That we don’t give a hoot about these things that we say “Really Matter” to us? Is Prudence right? Is this just a dismaying lack of Moral Fiber? As I decide to have more tea before tackling a wedding gown encrusted with beads that must come off, one by one, I realize it’s not that we don’t care enough—it’s that we care far too much. Fear is at the heart of what is shutting us down:

·        Fear of Failure—what if I cannot do this?  What if I take all the beads off this dress and never get them back on the same way?  What if I make this woman resemble a tube of toothpaste that has been squeezed too hard at both ends? What if this ruins her whole wedding and she never gets the chance to take that honeymoon in Aruba and swim with the dolphins and she spends the rest of her life hating me for it?

·        Fear of Decision Making—there are a number of ways I can tailor this dress—which one is going to have the best outcome? How do we define the “best” outcome anyway?  Best for whom? Is this woman going to regain the weight she lost and want this let back out in six months? When is the actual date of this wedding? Should I not cut anything before the next fitting?

·        Fear of Success—If I do a good job at [whatever this wretched task is], am I going to be assigned to [this wretched task] forever more? Will I be the new Queen of Wretched tasks? Will word spread and Peasants drag forth all manner of Wretched Tasks from their wardrobes and bring them and lay them at my feet, hoping I will do them perfectly, cheerfully, and in a timely manner? Will I never do anything else? (I think this is why my mother refused to learn to drive the tractor…)

·        Equating Self-worth with the quality of work—If I do a bad job, I myself am Bad. Yep, here’s the proof.  If I cannot make your awkward neckline curve around your lobsided cleavage just the way you want it, I have Failed as a human being.  No amount of donating to Habitat for Humanity will save me now.  It’s over. I’m done. I might as well take off RUNNING with these scissors until I come to the sticky end I deserve.

·        Focusing on the Outcome instead of the Process—Instead of thinking “I’m so lucky! I love to sew and there is an endless amount of sewing to be done in this magical shop where people bring us more to do all the time,” I count prom dresses and moan “Two hundred and twenty!! Are you out of your mind?! We could encircle New England with that much horsehair braid alone…We can’t do that many!!!” (But we DID—and not all of them at the last minute.)

·        Not equating the emotional impulses of Now with consequences to the Future Self—I tried to raise my children to self-moderate in ways that made them kinder to their future selves.  I remember trying to explain to The Son that getting his school project done early, instead of going fishing with his friend, would make his future self grateful. “Future Son is not going to be happy when he comes home and has to do all this work when he is tired and full of bug bites.  What do you think is the best choice?” He looked right at me and said, “Nah…screw him. He’ll figure it out. That’s his problem!” Hmmm….I wonder where he learned THAT?

I’m Curious. Why do we consistently choose Sabotage over self-regulation?  (“Simple,” says Inner Child, “Because it means we get to eat the ice cream first!” “Because you are Fallen, Wicked,” says Prudence.)  Why attempt to change the cycle of Avoidance-Anxiety-Shame now?  It’s been familiar and predictable, despite the whopping toll in Alka-seltzer bills.  I don’t believe it’s a mere case of Will-Power vs. Resistance. I have proved to myself many times that I DO have will-power. I have hiked mountains, run several half-marathons, and once even learned an entire fiddle tune in the key of F.  I’ve even managed to keep this blog going until this morning…Though I am willing to concede that my sense of “Time Management” is, um… Optimistic at best.

One of the lies I tell myself is that I work best “under pressure.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Few things are as stressful as having a customer watch me thread a needle and then poke myself in the thumb and bleed all over her clothes because I am in a rush to give her stuff that is not quite done. 

What is it that is really at the core of my Resistance?  (Any time there is a Good Thing you know you ought to be doing yet you find yourself Not Doing It, there is Resistance at work.) It’s not the type of activity that makes the difference; I can find ways to procrastinate about anything!  It’s about the sense of Alignment I feel while I am doing it. Unconditional Love is what creates for me the path of Least Resistance.  When I release all those fears listed above and embrace a sense of Love for what I am doing (and who I am doing it for), I open up into a creative flow that jump starts momentum until I can’t wait to get on with it.  I know this sounds corny.  Here is where Prudence jumps in with one of her sermons on the need for “Sacrifice.” Sacrifice, it turns out, has the same root as the word Sacred. It is what we consciously forgo when we release whatever is standing in the way of us getting closer to what is Sacred.  I’m pretty sure that means making us feel Lighter, Stronger, Freer, and even More Creative and Productive—but without the customary last minute Panic Attack.  

What if We Who Procrastinate could just take a moment to gather ourselves in and ask what our Resistance is requiring from us?  (Hint: It’s probably not more cookies, shoes, or booze…) Is it that we are not loving ourselves as we love others? Are we being perfectionistically impossible for ourselves to deal with? Who wants to work for a tyrant, especially the one in your own head?  Is it that we don’t the love others? (especially if they have a tendency to buy pants with too much top-stitching?)  How can we listen to the needs of the various parts of ourselves to rest or to rejoice, in order to renew our commitment to our mission? When we know what to do AND WE DO IT—great things happen.  Joy ensues. Magic Manifests.   

On the Bright Side, not everyone Procrastinates: My co-worker’s daughter texted yesterday to say that she had gotten through her fourteen day diet plan in about four hours. Good for her!

Well, the fun’s over.  Time to get back to work! (after I check my email, of course, then the phone to see if anyone has texted me during the intervening seven minutes since I last checked it!) Be well my Dearies!  Love yourself to itty-bitty-bits today!  Your work will be so much the better for it.

Yours aye,

Nancy

P.S. You didn’t actually think I would get a blog about Procrastinating out on Time, did you?

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Just Do Your Best...

Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.”

– Maya Angelou

 Greetings Dear Ones!

As so often happens here in New England, we no sooner get finished shoveling away the last of the snow, go in to warm up by the fire, then head back to the shed for more wood only to discover that the lilacs have bloomed without warning, the grass needs mowing, and the humidity has turned one’s hair to candy floss that birds want to rip right out of your head and use as nesting material.  (Ok, maybe that last bit is just me…) (But yes, it really happened!) You know you really need to condition your hair when a determined little Tufted Titmouse won’t let you sew outside without pestering you for home goods! Mother Nature seems as good at shifting gears as a sixteen-year-old attempting to drive a Standard transmission for the first time—we have jumped from first gear to high gear and totally ground up the clutch.

In the shop, Prom season is finally winding down, even if the Seamsters aren’t.  (We are still wound up over all the weddings!) June 1st is the last prom and all of the gowns are finished, if not picked up yet.  That just leaves the last minute “malfunctions” to hurdle as they come and then we can close the book on another season. The place looks a little bombed out without all the gowns. We couldn’t possibly have more residual glitter in every conceivable crevice if we had tucked a hand grenade in Tinkerbell’s knickers and pulled the pin.  We are still finding it in our food, in our cars, and on our pillows at night when we go home to sleep. A friend who crafts and sews observes “Glitter is like the Clap of crafting. Once you have it; you can never get rid of it.”  It’s even going home on the suits we tailor for men—men who probably assume all their work was done by pixies.

In addition to weddings, we are starting to get back to more “normal” alterations. (Hint: There is No Such Thing As Normal!)  A woman presents me with her favorite pair of pants.  “I need you to help these pants survive until this kind of waistline comes back in fashion so I can buy more.  It’s neither too high nor too low.  They don’t make them like this right now.”  Prudence nods her head—right now the waistlines on women’s garments are as uncertain as the creek levels in Spring. I look at her trousers. They are black and nicely made.  The fabric looks exhausted and the seams stretched to the point of looking perforated but I don’t immediately perceive anything that requires mending.  Everything just looks frail and strained. I hold them up to the light and daylight streams through certain areas.   She points to two spots immediately below the crotch where the fabric is especially thin. “See here? Chub Rub,” she states flatly. “Any cure for that?  I can’t bear to have that wear right through.”  I offer to patch them but she doesn’t think that will look very good.  “What would you like me to do?” I ask. “Just Do Your Best, Honey,” she says briskly, “You’re the professional.  I’m sure you’ll think of something.”  The brat in me longs to stick her tongue out at the lady as she turns to go. I HATE being told to “do my best.”  Why? Because as a somewhat anxious and sensitive person, I have no idea where that particular goal line is.  When have I arrived? I want to know. “Never,” says Prudence. Am I even Close? “No,” says Prudence.  I slump.

Next in is a fast-talking young man who needs his garment ready in less than three days.   Six months ago, the last time we saw him, we were altering his suit so he could chauffer limousines.  Today, he has the ceremonial robes of a minister and the sleeves are about four inches too long.  How is this newly-minted leader of a flock going to reach the hearts and wallets of his devoted followers without his beautifully expressive hands showing by Friday? The sleeves are long and complicated with huge cuffs that extend to the elbow and are embedded in the outer seam of the sleeve.  “I know it’s a rush job,” he says, “Just Do Your Best.” 

In the corner, is an former nun who wants the sleeves shortened on a Talbot’s jacket.  We can’t turn up the sleeves from the bottom because the button holes are cut.  We cannot take it up at the shoulder because it will narrow the top of the sleeve too much to accommodate the circumference of her upper arm.  “Just do your best,” she says piously, as if she is assigning homework. “That’s all anyone can ask.” “Ah…” says Prudence knowingly, “But you’re asking for a wee bit more, aren’t you?”  After all, if you wanted this to look like crap, you’d try to fix it yourself, wouldn’t you?  You are here asking for MY best because you are willing to bet money (i.e. pay a fee) because you think “my best” is slightly better than your best.  We are ALL hoping that “my best” will be your dream come true.

Just do your best… What is that anyway?  I know these people.  When most say “Just do your best” what they really mean is “slide the needle on that continuum that goes from ‘anything-you-do-is-better-than-the-way-it-is-now’ as far right as you can towards ‘as-good-as-new, well-better-than-new-because-I-probably-shouldn’t-have-bought-it-in-the-first-place…”  When others say it, they mean “I still expect a miracle.  I know you have a magic wand around here somewhere.”   Sometimes, when people say “it doesn’t have to be perfect…just do your best,” they think they are giving us some ease, relieving us of some pressure.  They aren’t.  Are we supposed to believe they would actually accept mediocrity? Nope.  They won’t! “Best” is the moving target we accidentally hit after we aim for Perfect and fail.  Sometimes we have to keep rejecting and revising what seems to be our “best work” until we get something that will fly.  Sometimes we have to start over and over with no vision, no idea of any sort of Platonic Ideal, just warped shadows dancing in the firelight upon the cave wall. Sometimes we find ourselves at 3:pm with a measuring tape, humming a BeeGees melody from the 1970’s and changing the lyrics to “How deep is your crotch, how deep is your crotch, I really need to know… because we’re living in a world of fools…” because some woman has dropped off two pairs of pants that have nothing to do with each other and she wants you to make them match—or “as best you can.”

I notice a bumper sticker on my way home.  It reads, “Just Do your best and God will do the Rest.” Oh goody, I think.  I hope He knows how to use the blind-hemmer!  He’s probably back at the shop right now, trying to get the left side to match the right on that wretched little wind-breaker I “did my best” on today.    The next day, there is no evidence that any Supreme Being has done anything while I was gone. Maybe “my best” wasn’t enough to tempt the Almighty—or perhaps He has the same regard for glitter I do and fled.

“Do your best” is definitely a mantra that leads to misery because, as my beloved brother-in-law from Texas says, “You Can’t Fix Stupid.”  No…but you can watch it in action every day in a tailoring shop when people ask for the Impossible, say “the best” will do, only to find out that “the best” was not all that good in the end. But it was the Best we could do. Truly.   We are the tailoring version of the Statue of Liberty here, saying “Give us your tired (trousers), your poor (internet choices), Your huddled masses (of undergarments) yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming closet….”—we cannot guarantee “Perfick”, we only offer hope for Better.

Here are a few things I have learned from trying to “Do my Best”: 

·         Imagination is often more useful than Knowledge. 

·         Doing our Best does not always make for good sewing but it makes for Good People.  I need to do my best, even when no one else is looking.  That way, even if I am disappointed by the results, I never have to be disappointed in myself.

·         Struggling does not mean I am stupid—it might mean the task is beyond my scope. And that’s ok.

·         My Best varies from day to day—it differs according to the caffeine, sleep, exercise, and food gauges of my body, and whether or not I have spent the dawn hours trying to corral escaped sheep.  (Last week, “my best” included rolling over my own cell phone and crushing it beneath a tire I was trying to check for a puncture.)

·         My “Best” can be any combination of Real, Imperfect, Flawed, Quirky, Weird, Beautiful, or Magical…  It can also be downright awful.

·         I don’t have to be satisfied with my best.  It can be what runners call a PB—the personal best—that is next week’s target to beat. (NOT that I intend to run over multiple cell phones!!!)

·         “Best” can be a “Good Enough” place to end or it can be the pause you take before climbing higher.

Mr.  Liberated Normandy comes in to have his WWII uniform resized to fit him.  It’s a vintage thing he bought on Ebay because his own original version is unavailable for service and he doesn’t want to wear his dress uniform for the upcoming Memorial Parade.  For some reason, he wants to wear this eight- pounds-of-wool jacket that has all the wrong insignia and smells of mothballs and mold instead.  He gives us a picture of how we are supposed to make the insignia look and where the braid needs to go on the sleeves.  Naturally, he does not have the braid and has no idea where we should get it. “Just do your best,” says this Old Soldier who can no longer see.  He is the only WWII veteran left in his town.  I think of him tottering down the street in the heat on Memorial Day and all of those who gave, not just their Best, but their ALL and I am supremely Grateful. Suddenly, dealing with glitter, chub-rub, and jammed hemmers doesn’t seem all that bad.

Do your Best, my darlings, even if it’s not Good Enough. It is.

With love for your Best, your Worst, and your In-between,

Yours aye,

Nancy

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In the Real World...

Greetings my Dear Ones!

Well, the bad sledding we call “Spring” continues here in New England.  Proms are going on despite lashing wind, bucketing rain, and seasonally below average temperatures. Sunday night, surrounding areas got a light dusting of SNOW—but not enough for proper sledding… The dogs and I are still crowding each other around the wood stove in the evenings.  The lambs, bless them, have wooly coats several inches long now and are quite happy bouncing around outside, impervious to the raw weather.

Another thirty gowns left the shop last week and we have called a halt to taking any more in—all we have to do is get the sixty still on the racks OUT before the mothers and fathers subsidizing this frivolous festival of fabric have to eat their weight in alka-seltzer.  Of course, Prom gowns are not all we do here—they aren’t even really the priority.  Weddings are.  Wedding Season overlaps Prom Season, as well as Graduation Season and Rip Your Pants For No Good Reason Season.  In the Feast of Absurdity that is a tailoring shop in Springtime, one portion of the plate is dedicated to Graduation gear.  Quite a number of girls are bringing multiple dresses in along with their prom gowns because they are also Seniors who are graduating.  I spent two days remaking vintage suits for boys who wanted to wear their father’s old tuxedos to their events.  Despite the weather and the dismal chances of a garden, it is a time of great Hope…of Optimistic New Beginnings.  

A graduate-to-be telephones to say that he does not have a cap and gown that fits him.  He wants to know if we can take the zipper out of his gown and then put in [his words] “a huge hunk of stretchy material and then cut that in half and put the zipper back in the middle of that” and how much would that cost?  Did he major in Fashion Design? Prudence wants to know. If not, tell him to shut the hell up and let us do our jobs the way we already know how! His garbled requests are so mystifying over the phone we insist he has to bring this gown into the shop so that we can walk around it in person.

When this engineering student comes in and shows us the situation, we realize that, for all his graduate-level book-learning about physics and geometry, this kid ain’t smarter than a fifth-grader, hell, he ain’t even smarter than a seamstress.   For one thing, in sewing, as in Newtonian physics, for each thing you do to a garment there is an equal and opposite reaction.  To keep things symmetrical i.e. “beautiful” (the ancient Greeks—symmetry = Beauty)  one must split the difference required (whether you are taking in or letting out a garment) and do the SAME THING to both sides as best you can.  Front and back are partners in this, left and rights are partners in this.  It’s like a square dance, with head couples and side couples.  They have to do maneuvers that balance and match.  It’s something we humans appreciate in our dancing as well as our clothing. 

This young man wants to enlarge only the front of his gown, so that the arms and side seams align somewhere with his scapulae. Think of cracking an egg top to bottom and only opening the front.  Naturally, we could not tell someone about to get a big piece of paper for being Smart, how dumb his solution was.  He rants on and on about needing “stretchy material” while we ignore him and take the measurements for the two side panels in matching fabric he needs.  Later, we add extra pleats so that the gown flows around him like a graduation gown is supposed to do.   “He’s going to learn a thing or two once he is out in the Real World,” someone comments. 

It gets me thinking.  What, exactly, IS “the Real World?” Russell Baker said “The best advice I can give anybody about going out in the world is this: Don’t Do it. I have been out there.  It is a mess.” I peer around the shop—this has got to be it. There is a half-naked woman in the dressing room whose feet smell like the inside of a hockey bag; there are scraps and thread and glitter ankle deep all over the floor, the phone won’t stop ringing and there is a man waiting at the counter to tell us that his wife has two different sized legs and we’ve wrecked her pants by hemming them evenly.  A woman who spent the morning sucking down a giant latte laxative from Junk ‘N Donuts has just gone into the restroom and had a dump that is making my eyes water.  It’s even obliterating the pong from Miss Hockey Feet. Beautiful gowns hang from the ceiling everywhere I turn.  I cannot see my co-workers in the forest of pastels… Yep.  This is the Real World alright.  

We are all part of some fantastic Show.  What is “real” about the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what sort of costumes we need to act out the pageants of our lives?  Is it “real” to dress everyone in identical ceremonial outfits and then have them listen to a 45 minute address about how Individuality is What Matters out “In the Real World”?  I think about the days when I sat in rows of matching caps and gowns, as if we were all attending Hogwarts, getting thoroughly sedated by the guest speakers, before they opened the gates to ‘the real World’ so we could rush in, like it was an amusement park, and ride all the rides! and transform the landscape with our youth! and energy! and enthusiasm! And, um, crisp…new… knowledge…. (slump) and by the time they were done—we all just stumbled numbly towards our relatives, wondering where we would go to eat and what would happen next.  The “real world” has been something like that ever since—the struggle to locate our families and loved ones, and figure out when and where and what to eat.  I’m pretty sure it’s been like that since cave times.  Get the graduates all fired up on platitudes about “Oh the Places You’ll Go” and achieving the high standards “Of generations that went before you” and then spend the rest of the day wondering where grandma wandered off to. And so it begins… this new chapter in your life.

For those of you who have not been there yet, in the Real World you will find:

·        Salt looks a lot like Sugar—be wary!

·        Your education only qualifies you to do more learning.  You have NOT learned enough—not by a long shot!

·        98% of the people you deal with are actually very nice but the 2% who ruin it for everybody make you wish you for a solitary job in horticulture

·        The boy doesn’t always get the girl

·        The girl doesn’t always get the boy, or the girl, or the job, or the book deal, or the laundry folded…

·        The test comes first, the lessons after

·        Depending where you go to school, you are taught either of two things: that swearing is wrong, or that praying is wrong.  “They” were wrong.  You must do both.

·        Good & Evil are partners here to teach us to step up our game, become better people, and to understand the significance of well-knit socks…

·        Miracles happen when you least expect them

·        So do disasters

·        Only Living prepares us for life and you’ve already done some of that, so you’re good

·        You will need more diapers than you first imagined

To the young graduates shuffling through our shop, before they hop on that Hamster wheel life alarmingly bereft of satisfaction, I want to say:  don’t get stuck spending eight hours a day to get money to buy things you think are going to make you happy, finding out they don’t actually make you happy, then going back to work to trade another eight or eighty hours to see if the next cycle will make you happy… Do the thing that makes your heart sing.  Sometimes it will be hard and that’s good for you.  Good and “easy” are not synonyms.   But pay attention: If what you are doing turns you into someone your own heart does not like, stop doing it. Ask what changes can be made, then make them. When we become people we don’t like, we start to resent those we serve.  No Good comes of that.  Listen to yourself—not the self that says “let’s sit on the couch and binge-watch Netflix”—but the Deep Self, the part of you that knows Right and Wrong.  Listen to that self.

If you can’t hear that self, get quiet and listen harder. There are layers of awareness.  And for Heaven’s sake, DON’T EVER let anyone tell you you are broken or defective.  You are not broken; you are Whole.  Maybe you  are just not yet fully developed—in the same way that my little lambs are not “broken” they are just very young and small and silly and walk as though the earth is a trampoline. In the same way, apple blossoms are not apples yet. Just because they are not apples does not mean they are wrong or “broken”—just that they need time, water, sunlight, bees…  Your youth, your innocence—these are your Gifts, not your Fault.  Take your time, build the self and life you choose.   A lot of the daily stuff will be about where to go, what to wear, how to find the ones you love in the jungle of other faces, but occasionally, you will pull off Great and Magical and Big things.  Be proud of it all. Especially the little stuff.  As Bette Reese said, “If you think you are too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito.” 

Grow Strong!  Be Well!  Do Great things and make lots of money—Social Security is counting on you! (Ha ha ha)

With all sorts of stinky, smelly, glitter-encrusted REAL love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

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Some Life Questions?

“Knowing the answers will help you in school. Knowing how to question will help you in Life.”

—Warren Berger

Greetings Dear Ones!

Have you ever spent the weekend with a certain friend who leaves you swirling in endless questions? Questions that rip you open and leave you room to grow that, until then, you had not known you needed? How many ways are there to ask such questions?  Is it Ok to have no answers? How may I live at peace with No Answers and instead live more authentically into where these Questions might lead? A musician-prophet my voice recognition software is calling “Elsewhere Phrases” wants to know—Why am I here?  What the hell am I doing at a fiddle camp when I should be cleaning my garage and selling my furniture so I can move and get on to my Someday-Life? Why not a sewing camp? (Are there such things?) Why not a writing weekend, which might be more necessary in the short term? (Should I start a sewing camp?) Would I just wind up cooking instead?  Or would I have to spend a lot of time wondering how to change a fuse box because the teenagers blew all the fuses with their hairdryers?  At the very least, shouldn’t I be back in the shop, laboring over one of the 67 prom gowns, which has to be 3-6 inches shorter by May 11th?

Why go to a fiddle retreat?  Because the grass is too wet to mow? Because I couldn’t face cleaning the garage? Because the Journey Continues?  Or all of these things? Now that I am here, what is the best use of my time—to sit on a couch until the wee hours, making verbal burbled heart-connections with fellow members of this beloved tribe, or shall I travel out alone beneath the stars and use horsehair on a stick to capture one by one notes that scamper like fireflies into the bewildering darkness, until each is safely caught and resting in neat lines along the length of the tune, waiting submissively for me to tap it gently with my finger so it can glow when the time is right?  Awash in music, intoxicated by an ancient Celtic reel clicking by at a heart-rate of 120 beats per minute, in a vortex of vibration, community, and the frictionless flow of a bow arm swinging like a piston on a steam train—is there any better way to LIVE? Ever? If only for a breath, a moment, or an evening that connects itself to Eternity in every direction?

What does it mean to Be Here? To be ALIVE? To me? To you? To any of us? Does that young mother, eating with one arm because the other one is holding a baby, have any idea what she is giving her child as she feeds her with her own hungers for Beauty, for Peace, for the thrill of this Universal Language that connects?  What can mothers ever give us besides Food and also Hunger?

What is to become of us at this camp?  And why did I think it was necessary to consume the Whole of that bean burrito at lunch? Will there be embarrassing consequences? How can I ensure that the “Vibrations” I raise, have nothing to do with the legumes I have ingested? How can we succor each other as we labor to bring Light to a world that cannot yet decide how it wants to be but only knows the choices are “for better or worse” but never for the same?  Will we be better people come Monday? Is there any way to stand up, or sit down, or walk out, sing, speak, or shout, “Please, dear World, Choose Better!!!”? Or should I just cross my legs primly and wait, hoping I make it to the bathroom before everyone rushes out during break time?

Is there no greater act of Courage than in giving your soul to your art—to having some Call from within answered in your handiwork? Is there no greater act of Hope or Fear than in bringing a precious, vulnerable, newborn child into this world so that it can ruin your body, ruin your sleep, alter every aspect of your Life, your schedule, your finances, your flesh, your mind, your heart—yet see it grow so it can hear and play and LIVE this music?

Beyond Pro-birth, what does “Pro-Life” mean? Does it mean ALL life? Does it include spotted things like Owls and Salamanders? Does it mean we cherish our Polar Bears and the Jungle Lungs of the planet? And How do we honor those who bring and bear Life, who nurture, protect, and serve the vulnerable in their care?  Where are the babysitters and math tutors they need? Who is their help? Who brings their food, provides their shelter, lends them vocational or educational support? Where are the extra muscles, hands and feet, when they can go no further, in their deep exhaustion, and do no more for their (our) young?

What was that note that just flashed by? Was it C sharp or C natural? Why are these beans holding me hostage? Why did I eat that Burrito? Where is the balance point in this battle in my head—in the struggle between words and wordlessness?  Should I have stayed home? Was making sure a prom dress was 3 inches shorter a better use of my time? WHY did I eat so many beans?

When the instructor goes around the room and asks us to say why we are here, how do I reply? Is the correct answer to say that I want to master the up-driven bow in a snappy Strathspey? Or Grace notes? Or Love notes? What if I stand up and ask to be Forgiven and leave the “for what” up to everyone’s imaginations? Which will create the worse scandal? Truth or Beans?

What are the choices we make in our own lives, for Life? To be fully ALIVE—mentally, spiritually, organically—beans and all? Does Evil exist in any other form than the limiting, diminishing, or denying the privileges of Life? How can we begin to talk about this in larger, softer, kinder ways? Is there a friendly way to discuss Death when we cannot even decide if the bow should go up or down? For isn’t that what we imply, every time Life is mentioned?  How can we enlarge the discussion about the Seed into the discussion of the Forest too? And what it means to Bloom? What are the ingredients we need to Flourish? How can we make sure others are getting what they need too?

What if Life is not something that can be defined by Biologists, Priests, or Doctors? What if it is something that only you and I and the Poets can know for sure, after dancing naked in the rain?  

Who are you? Where have you been? How do you do? What do you do? Why are you here? How long has it been since I’ve seen you? Where are you going? What’s next? Have you found your voice yet? Have you heard your own throat in full song?  What if every relationship we entered into from now on was an answer to the question “What does Cherish mean to you?”

Since when is Cynicism valued over Optimism, as if it is the more intelligent choice? How do we begin the process of installing Sophistication on Optimism and removing its unhelpful connotations of naivete and ignorance? What happens to us when we seek to define ourselves outside of (or without) the traditional contexts of “Success”?  Is the cellist my software insists on calling “Gnat House” talking about a “traumatic” bass line? What is that word she keeps saying? Dramatic?  Is there even a difference anyway?

As notes pelt and land on the desert of my skin, seeping through to join the beating of my blood and emerge as tears, I ask myself, “What is it I have to learn from this kind of Loving?”  What if being around “like-minded” people is actually dangerous?  What if our minds are too small? How can we be around more like-hearted people?

What if I told you that I don’t actually love you for your [music] (or art or science) but for that Thing within you that makes you seek and serve your Gift? Would you understand that? What if it is not about the painting, or the song, or the dance, or the clever use of metaphor I love so much—what if I love best your ability to say YES? What if it’s simply your Thirst for what is Good—for Justice, for the perfection of an up-driven bow, and for “No Voices to be Silenced” by Orchestral or governmental forces, that makes me glimpse your Source, and therefore mine? What if the Serving of that Thing is the thing that makes you most Alive?  When are we going to stop worrying about what size or shape our candles are and start worrying about whether they are Lit?

What is Motherhood, essentially, but saying Yes to the Life crying to be born within us? And how is Mother’s Day to be endured by the aching women who said their Yes, yet whose empty arms extend with desperate longing to hold those yet unborn, those taken too early by disease, accident, drugs, disasters, or incarceration? How do we hold these women in our hearts and hugs and tell them they are not forgotten? That they have not “failed” Motherhood?  How do we include those women who never had their kidneys punched from the inside, who never felt that hot, red, spiral of hellish pain as they pushed another person’s body out of their own body, and tell them they are still Mothers for all they sacrifice in doing What Must be Done for the young? That they are some of the Best mothers of all?

Who said the first Yes to your request to be here? How are you now choosing your own Life? Be it with roses, with kind deeds or chocolates, with a card, or simply in the Silence of your heart—how are you Thanking your own Mother for the gift of your one, tiny, Amazingly Precious Life?

I love you, my Darlings.  Of that, there is no question! Happy Mother’s Day!

Yours aye,

Nancy

 

Faking It

Greetings my dear ones!

Spring has been a bit of Fake News here.  (Well, we certainly aren’t having a heat wave!) Flowers are defiantly squeezing themselves up between cold clots of mud only to be pelted and slain.  All night, Mother Nature chucked pearls at the windows which fell and crusted on my slumping Daffodils who, between the rain and the yellow dog scribbles, are probably wondering why they’ve bothered.  I turned the central heating off weeks ago as a matter of Principle; because the Calendar says I ought to, not because my skin or bones agree.   Even fur-bearing residents are still seeking the heat of the wood stove at day’s end and in the hours before dawn, when we rise but the thermometer doesn’t.

Mr. & Mrs. Wood Swallow, whose summer holiday home is beneath the overhang by my kitchen door, have returned to inspect their nest and to mutter and tut about what a mess it is.  The female glares at me like this is all my fault.  The male perches on a nearby plant hanger, whistling tunelessly, eyeing me with sidelong glances until his partner snaps at him to get back to work. I too am like a bird tearing her next apart—cleaning, clearing, rearranging my home.  We nod civilly, like good neighbors who don’t get too involved in each other’s business, as we pass by in this shared corridor to the garage, each on our way to our version of a dumpster to discard everything that no longer brings us Joy.

Mr. Shorts comes into the shop with everything bare from his ankles to mid thighs.  We remark that it is a bit early for shorts.  Shorts retorts “Anything above 38 degrees is shorts weather in New England.” It’s true that, by this stage of the year, 40 feels balmy—like T-shirt weather—but not in a driving rain and howling wind.  Prudence wrinkles her nose at the sight of a man’s leg before July. At least he is wearing shoes and not socks with sandals.

Prom season has made us all a wee bit tense and crabby in the shop. And by “a wee bit,” you understand I really mean “oh, Hell Yeah!” So I have had to get a hold of this Crabbiness—born of panic and fatigue—and give it a good wrestle, knock it to the ground, and insist to myself and it that I will be CHEARFUL [sic] (I love 18th Century spelling). This is a Great Opportunity to develop some Character around things that bug me.  Happiness is a Choice.  Even if you have to Fake it.

So enough whining.  Speaking of Faking it…On to the topic on everyone’s mind (after the Bruin’s chances in the play-offs, of course): Undergarments. Specifically, padded bras. What good is a blog about the Secrets of a seamstress if we don’t mention the Unmentionables once in a while?  We have another 68 gowns to alter before May 18th (we’ve already finished more than 70) and more are coming in every day. At least 44% will require the addition of Bust pads.  This time of year, we order them by the bale.

“What are bust pads?” ask the Uninitiated. It turns out that Bust Pads are little (or large) things that look like dented jam donuts with all the jam mooshed out of them that get sewn into a dress so that you don’t have to wear a bra stuffed with toilet paper to make the dress fit. Who knew? You would think I, of all people, would have known about this sooner—after spending anguished years as a teen, trying to fill out a AA cups that wouldn’t contain so much as a poached egg. (Though, in this weather, a bra full of cotton-balls does benefit the wearer a little extra warmth!)

Whether you scorn ladies undergarments as symbols of Patriarchal Oppression or, as in recent decades (think Victoria’s Secret), hail them as a source of female sexual empowerment, it’s undeniable that they have been an endless source of fascination, contention, and debate since women began wearing underwear. In the Victorian era, dress reformers declared that restrictive garments prevented women living healthy lives, and dared to argue that underwear should not “exceed seven pounds in weight.” (Try telling that to some of our customers! You should see what they lug in here!) Underwear gives us a glimpse into a larger story: the expectations, limitations and status afforded to women throughout history.  Corsets, crinolines and crotch-less pants: for centuries, women have been expected to wear a variety of weird and wonderful contraptions under their clothes to achieve a desirable silhouette. The return of the belly-squishing corset, in the form of the flattering Spanx, shows we’re not over our historical (hysterical?) obsession with flat tummies and small waists.

In the dressing room, we see everything from ribs with nipples to women who would suffer severe head trauma if they jogged.  Not only are no two women exactly alike—on the same woman, not even two breasts are alike.  How this figures into bra sizing makes the mind boggle.  Thanks to modern technology, we now have available to us a dizzying array of synthetic prosthetics for surgery survivors, cross dressers, and those, like me, who got two generous helpings of rump and forgot to add breasts when they went through Heaven’s Body Buffet.  Now, toilet paper is once again free to be used for what it does best—and making nun’s costumes for Barbies. (You might have to reread past blog entries to get that last reference…)

For the most part, this is a female issue.  Guys, for all their insecurities about “size issues,” don’t seem to worry enough to fill their jock straps with Kleenex on a regular basis. Nor do their “fashionable silhouettes” require this of them, cod-pieces having gone out of style in the 17th century.  But girls… wow! Day after day, I witness them in all their anxious vulnerability, wearing big, clunky sports bras underneath their prom gowns. They stand there, their dignity and crinolines so tightly furled about them, as they clutch at their meager bosoms and wonder what can be done about these gaudy bodices that dent inward. I feel their pain.  I hope it does not take them another thirty years to understand that Femininity and Allure have nothing to do with how much adipose tissue you have or where it is located.  No woman can be considered truly “sexy” who does not love herself.  It’s not what you put on yourself, but what you summon from within  that makes people sit up and notice. Well…most of the time. (I’ll admit that it IS possible to roam the streets of Boston taking selfies in leather bondage gear with Smurf-Blue hair to your hips and get more than a few people at a traditional music session in an Irish pub to go to the window to Look at you!)(Don’t ask how, but I do know this for a fact…)

Underwear, by its very definition, (hint: the clue is in the name—UNDER) is not meant to be seen. But Underwear doesn’t just shape our bodies, it shapes out lives.  And our History.  It seems to take the pendulum an average of 40 years to complete its swing from the absurd back over to the ridiculous. A hundred years ago, in the 1920’s, an androgynous style—flat chest and slim hips was popular.  By the 1940’s, hip pads and the “bullet bra” (making breasts resemble twin torpedoes) made for a highly stylized “womanly” figure. By the 1960’s, we were favoring the “barely there” bras.  Ten years later, in the 1970’s we got smart and burned them altogether, deciding to use exercise not underwear to reconfigure the body.

Now we have bust pads and Cutlets. Cutlets are little silicone things, the shape of a push up pad (or a chicken cutlet, hence the name) that you put in your bra to add cleavage.

Prudence thinks there is no sense in adding in what God has left out but I disagree. I once invested in a set of “cutlets,” which you can get from any CVS or pharmacy.  That was when I lived in an extremely COLD house.  It was winter and I wanted to wear said cutlets to a formal event.  When I pulled them out of my lingerie drawer, they were frozen rock hard.  Who wants to put that on the tenderest of bare skin? I put them on the radiator to thaw, got distracted, and forgot about them.  When my then husband found them (locating them by means of an unusual smell) they had scorch-lines across them like genuine grilled chicken breasts. “I think these are fully cooked” he said. “Thank you,” I said, tucking them into my bra with as much aplomb as I could muster.

It’s hard to make small-talk at a social gathering with Vanity in the form of charred silicone sticking to one’s chest but I managed.  It took me a few more years to realize that Beauty is more in how we radiate the Light of loving who we are, loving what we do, and loving and connecting to the people we are Listening to and serving, rather than anything we can stuff, tape, or tie to our bodies.

 “Fake it til you make it” is one of those obnoxiously chipper little memes that pops up continually in “pop” psychology and encourages us to be “ourselves, only better…” through the use of blatant, cheery deceit. I’m all for bettering myself, sure—but the idea of “faking” it is a fraught one on many levels and starts with the premise that we are “Not Enough.”  But sometimes Faking it, if only for a while, offers us a useful crutch --a way to begin.  If a hunk of foam rubber makes your dress fit better and that gives you more Confidence, then go for it.  It’s the Confidence that is sexy…NOT the foam rubber.

Don't pretend to be anything or anyone -- simply take action to Enable Joy.  It’s not warm just because one chooses to wear shorts; we don’t have any less work to do when we choose to smile and be kind—but it helps. It helps a lot.  Authenticity takes a variety of forms: Do one small brave thing, and then next one will be easier, and soon Joy will flow and morale will improve.  Sometimes we smile, not because we are Happy, but because we are Strong and that’s as good a reason to smile as any.  With regard to Spring Weather, Good Cheer, and Bust-sizes we need all the help we can get!

Be well, my darlings!  Be Warm and Brave and do Good Work!

Yours aye,

Nancy

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Holy Week

“Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine.” Charles Dickens 


Greetings My Lovelies!

Forgive my more-than-usually-disjointed ravings this week—I’m a little revved up on 75% off Cadbury’s Crème Eggs and what I think might be glitter poisoning…

Last week was quite an intense week on many levels.  For one, I truly appreciate and am deeply humbled by the number of kind-hearted souls who took the time to write encouraging notes congratulating me for showing up to write this blog for fifty-two weeks in a row.   I know it wasn’t always pretty—sometimes it was more street-fight than ballet—but I put myself out there and got roughed up and dirty and it felt really good to pause and celebrate surviving that.  I had planned to slap myself on the back, eat a truly revolting amount of chocolate, and totally slack off for a while but no… Thanks a lot! Because of helpful busybodies like them and all that residual “catholic guilt” from childhood, I now feel like I can’t stop.   So! On we plod…to glory, glitter, or the grave.  Who can tell?

The number of Prom gowns has reached the triple digits in the shop.  I am bobbing on a tide of tulle and lace, trying not to swallow too much glitter.  I keep losing my thimble, my scissors, and large portions of my sanity.   I’ll be so happy if we aren’t all bald with a twitch by June. I haven’t glimpsed my co-workers for days in the multi-colored forest that hangs from every rack and hook and spare bit of ceiling. The phone is ringing off the hook with teenagers who have never made a phone call to a live human being before: “yeah…um…I have like…um…I’m going to a…well, I need a dress that needs to get made, um… like, shorter maybe? Is that something you do?”  They might prefer to text but we can’t answer those because our hands are busy.  At least they are calling for themselves, not having their mothers do it for them.  Prudence thinks that any girl old enough to go to Prom is old enough to sort out her own schedule and the intricacies of getting a gown fitting in between cheerleading practice and student senate meetings. Fifty percent of the girls who don’t phone ahead, who just walk in the door with dresses the size of a bale of hay, have completely forgotten to bring their shoes. (Hint: we don’t know how short to make these dresses if you aren’t wearing your shoes! Offering to stand on tip-toes does not count!) For some reason, the fashion this year is to have gowns with skirts big enough to slip-cover a Volkswagon.   Some of them have as many as seven layers with the average layer being nine yards around with a least one four-inch bit of plastic horsehair braid around a layer—sometimes three.  “I don’t understand why this hem was so expensive,” says one mother, “after-all, it only had to come up a little bit.”  Yes, mutters Prudence, but that “little bit” had to come up all the way round, you daft woman, and it took a whole day!  It’s like watching a drunk trying to make it home on a Saturday night—it’s not the length of the road he has to stumble—it’s the width that really wears him out.  

For every two gowns we complete, another four come in.  The first prom is this Saturday, April 27th and they carry on every weekend until June 15th.  There are three or four different local schools all sharing the same date of May 18th so that seems to be the high water mark to hit.  In addition, we are still mending zippers, hemming trousers, and (up until Saturday) repairing adult-sized Bunny costumes.

A girls walks in with a gown. “Did you call for an appointment?” asks my friend.

“Oh,” she says hesitantly. “No…”

“It’s just that we can’t take any more gowns for May 3rd,” she explains.  “We are totally swamped and we want to be able to give everyone they best service we can so we have to say no to the May 3rd now, in order to get all the other May 3rds out of here.”

She says it as warmly and kindly as she can but the girl just meets her with a confused, blank stare.   My friend tries another tack: “When is your prom, honey?  Is it May 3rd?”

A light seems to switch on in the girl and she beams. “Oh!” She says brightly, “No, it’s not!” and heads for the dressing room.

“When is it?” I ask.

“Not until April 27th!” the girl announces cheerfully over her shoulder.

A man calls, wanting to know if we can hem his pants. “Yes,” we say, “Of course, just drop them off—give us a week to ten days.”

“WHAT?!” he barks.  “A Week? But I need them for Sunday!” (It’s Thursday.)

“Can you bring them right over now?” we ask.

“NO! I can’t do that!” he says, “I’ve got too many things to do today…I can’t get there until Saturday.”

“Just bring them,” we tell him with a sigh.

Saturday comes.  We are only open for three hours but more happens in those three hours than sometimes happens all week.  For one thing, the parking lot is always full when I arrive because people think we open at 9 and we open at 10 on Saturdays, so many have been in their cars, on their phones for the past 30 minutes before we unlock the door.  Their mouths are all making the same thin, peculiar line as they simultaneously grit their teeth and smile.  Their eyes are as hard as stale jelly beans. This is just one of their many stops and their errands are now all behind schedule.

Within three minutes, we have four people texting in the waiting area and two people roaming the shop putting their items on the work tables, the main desk, anywhere except the counter where we write up new work.  There is a bride in the dressing room who says she doesn’t like the way the top of her strapless dress is standing out so far away from her boobs.  “These look like boobies on the half shell,” she whines. We give her some body tape but instead of having it pull the dress in towards the body, it pulls the boobs out to the dress, so they resemble pale beige chewing gum stuck to a shoe. I can’t figure out how to solve this problem because the phone is ringing again and a woman in flip-flops with what appears to be a 3-litre container of Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffee (now half empty) is wondering if we have a bathroom.  In storms Mr. Thursday, wanting his pants hemmed while he waits.

I look at the pants he hands me.  The tags are still on them.  These are very well-made, high-end trousers from a reputable men’s shop that went out of business in JANUARY.  I can tell from the number of mark-downs on the price tag that he got them in the final days of the close-out sale.  “How long have you had these pants?” I want to ask him.  

“I need these for Easter,” he shrugs.  Prudence fumes. She’s all for people dressing nicely for Easter, or any occasion for that matter, but the notion that this man has to have this pair and no other, pants he’s owned for at least 15 of the previous Saturdays,  to celebrate the Joy of the Risen Christ seems absurd.  What else is in his closet? Would he have to run naked otherwise? What has he been wearing since January? Prudence suspects that he has NOT worn out all his other trousers by kneeling in hard pews at church or doing Penance.  She’s not even sure This Pair is destined to see a church.  More likely, he needs his mother and aunties to think he went to church before he tucks himself into their baked ham, ricotta pies, and ethnic cookies.  “Bona Pasqua!” he shouts as he exits the shop.  “Bona Pasqua!” answers my co-worker in Italian, though both of them are clearly American.  Prudence, invisibly, gives him the finger.  (Now, now, Prudence, shame on you!!!) She would like to point out that there were Other races and creeds celebrating Big Things in their communities too this past week—not one of them rushed us using their Religious Holiday as an excuse to manipulate us into neglecting other customers they deemed less important than themselves.

Thank goodness “Holy week” is over and we are done with the drama of Vernal Christians barging in and demanding we solve their fashion disasters with the urgency of a forest fire. (Whatever happened to knowing them “by their Love,” and not their hemlines?)  On the bright side, at least all the chocolate shaped like bunnies is now half price.  Now that Lent is over, we can wear white again and start the real days of pain and sacrifice…getting ready for swimsuit season!

Be well, my Dearies!  When the chocolate coma clears, listen for the chorus of peepers and the choirs of morning birds—the Music of Spring, the Real Worship—is all around you!  And just in case no one has said it lately, I love you very much.

Your aye,

Nancy

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Happy Blog-iversary!

Greetings Dear ones!

We did it!  We made it a whole year together!  I am so excited and proud of myself and immensely grateful to all of you who continue to read, comment, share, and support. Exactly one year ago, my dear friend Emerald Rae challenged me to drop what I was doing and Make This Happen.  Because, when you have a Dream, that’s when Life is about to Happen. (It’s also when someone lets you know you snore too loudly!)

So! Let’s recap.  Have we learned anything?

Time for another quiz:

1.     You write your very first blog. As per the instructions of your in-house tech-support (which is any resident under the age of 32) you manage to get it to “publish” without having to call a variety of hot-lines, break the internet, or speak directly to anyone in Asia. You then immediately:

a.      Feel sick, think “what have I just done?!” and need to lie down.

b.     Get up and go to your “real job” and try to behave normally.

c.      Step in dog poop because someone didn’t let the dog out.

d.     All of the above.

2.     When your loving and supportive friends read your first entry, their responses are, conveyed as kindly as possible:

a.      To express concern that you will never keep up the quality of writing or storytelling because there is “just not that much to write about with sewing.”

b.     To write you long emails, worrying that your intention is to make body-shaming the purpose of your literary endeavours.

c.      To remark that your writing is “self-indulgent,” “shallow,” and that you are “worthy of better things.”

d.     All of the above.

3.     After you ugly-cry yourself into a snot-snuffling mess, feeling totally unworthy, untalented, inept… you then:

a.      Watch inspiring Ted talks and recite affirmations until the urge to guzzle scotch directly from the bottle passes.

b.     Decide to buy a Celtic harp, for no reason what-so-ever

c.      Say, “F**k it.  Who cares what they say? I know who I am.  I know my intentions are kind. If I run out of stories, sure, I’ll quit. And yes, damn it, I AM Self-indulgent.  So what? I have teenagers, incontinent pets, and a Vitamin D deficiency. Who the hell ELSE is going to indulge me?”

d.     All of the Above.

4.     You find the harp is extremely good for

a.      Practicing scales and discovering that all the F strings and C strings are the colored ones. (This only takes a five days to figure out!)

b.     Distracting you from doing other Things You Should Be Doing, like sewing 62 snaps on an airline stewardess’s blouses.

c.      Holding laundry that’s too dirty to go back in the drawer and too clean to go in the wash.

d.     All of the Above

5.     When more of your friends say lovely, kindly, complimentary things to you praising your efforts, you:

a.      Try to believe them but still feel the need to eat a quart of Ben & Jerry’s “Cherry Garcia” ice cream to cheer up anyway.

b.     Lapse into fantasies of trying to write something “better” next week

c.      Ignore them because you have a dead sheep in your garage that needs burying and you don’t have time to dwell on your insecurities.

d.     All of the Above

6.     We each manifest, with our own time, unconscious intentions, and energies the Universe of our choosing. In some Worlds:

a.      All the clothes fit, the socks match, and the cars run

b.     All there is to do is watch T.V.

c.      Infant farm animals are using the living room couch as a playground

d.     (Guess which two worlds are totally incomprehensible to me)

7.     When you say YES to Life, to doing fifty things that make you more “you” because you just turned 50 and it seems like as good a time as any to start such nonsense, things will happen like:

a.      You might find two lambs bouncing around your cottage in the woods, getting tangled up in yarn from your spinning wheels until one lamb manages to drag about forty feet of yarn off a spindle and knit all your furniture together in a giant cobweb before she falls over, giggling and kicking her hind leg.

b.      People you never suspected will turn out to be amazing friends and co-conspirators.

c.       There will definitely be More Poo.

d.     All of the Above

8.     Choosing to stretch yourself beyond your comfort zone

a.      Will be really fun and wild and exciting at times

b.     Will make you feel like you move forward like an amoeba

c.      Will make you look like a total loon

d.     All of the Above

9.     This blog is in desperate need of

a.      Better editing

b.     More quizzes

c.      Cash prizes

d.     All of the above

10.    In my stories, to protect the Insolent, I always change:

a.      The customer’s physical description

b.     The customer’s garment

c.      Everything except the core “kernel” of the story

d.     All of the above

11.    This is because

a.      I protect and cherish my customers and sincerely wish for their happiness and satisfaction

b.     I want to poke fun at Ideas, not individuals

c.      I have enough angry people coming in snorting fire about bloody hems coming down—I don’t want an influx of irate customers who don’t like how they look in print any more than they don’t like how they look in the mirror.

d.     All of the Above

12.    I write:

a.      Whenever inspiration strikes—whenever  a story pops it’s head around the corner to see if I can hem a “quick pair of trousers” before closing time

b.     When I am supposed to be doing other, more Useful things like cooking supper, cleaning the house, or interrogating the residents to see who left that laundry in the washer until it grew fur

c.      At 4:44 am, in a bleary, sleep-deprived, last-minute frazzle

d.     All of the above

13.   If I have learned anything yet in my short fifty years, it’s that:

a.      Pretending I can sew/dance/cook/play music/write is a hell of a lot more fun than pretending I can’t.  

b.     Sometimes we are going to fall and make fools of ourselves and that’s ok as long as we learn from it and apologize to those we hurt when we crash.

c.      The yellow jellybeans really do taste like vomit.

d.     All of the Above.

14.     Sewing has taught me:

a.      I should have paid more attention in Math class

b.     The left side NEVER comes out like the right

c.      I have to take all the pins out of my padded bra before I go grocery shopping.

d.     All of the above

15.     Working with the general public has taught me:

a.      People are Amazing, Fantastic and Inspiring

b.     Sometimes they are Nice

c.      I totally hate people and prefer the company of animals

d.     All of the above

16.    The people who have been my Best Supporters are

a.      Veterinarians (hands down)

b.     Believers who operate through (any) Faith, not Fear—the Musicians & Dancers, Artists & Riskers, Darers, Doers & Dreamers, who bring incredible beauty, insight, and Love to the world through their practices and sacrifices. 

c.      My children and honorary “spirit children” who come into my life to offer tech support and teach me valuable lessons like LOL means “laugh out loud,” not “Lots of Love” (I still think it should mean the latter!!!)

d.     All of the Above.  I am indescribably grateful to you all!!

17.     Completing a whole year, despite all the things a Tuesday night ever threw at me—power outages, illness, escaped reptiles…. Feels like:

a.      A Victory! A tribute to dedication, perseverance, and sheer bloody-mindedness.

b.     Like an elephant, or a bicycle, eaten one bite at a time. (Burp)

c.       An exhausted marathoner limping towards the finish line with blisters, farts he can’t trust, and a pulled Achilles tendon.

d.     All of the Above

18.    This mile-marker means

a.       I can eat all the cookies I want today

b.      I just kept a big promise to myself.  I’m proud of that.

c.       I kind of want to slack off now…but I worry that it will be like when I decide to stop running for “a few weeks” in November and don’t start back up until April.

d.     All of the above

19.    My goals going forward are to:

a.        Keep taking one day/week/month/year/Life at a time.

b.      Create more opportunities for writing

c.       Vacuum more often

d.     All of the Above

20.    Hey!  If I could pull this off—if I could stick to a plan and hack away at it, bit by bit, usually at the very last minute but still getting it done,

a.      Anybody can

b.     Even people with an abundance of Dung in their lives

c.      You can too

d.     All of the Above

Scoring:

If you answered “A” to anything, anything at all, you my friend, are an Optimist.  Bless your loving heart.  Don’t EVER take off those rose-colored spectacles!  This world needs dreamers like you—who wake up ready to play, ready to dream, ready to create and willingly perceive the Joy and Abundance that surrounds them—who exult in the Possible. You are my Favorite kind of people.

If you answered “B” to any of the questions, you are fairly realistic. Like the majority of our customers, you want things done Yesterday but will settle for next Saturday and not complain too much as long as the work is done well.  You are my Favorite kind of people.

If you answered “C” to any of the questions, well, it just shows that you were too impatient to read all the way to “D.”  You are one of Hell’s tourists who fears the worst of everything.  Like Prudence, you are always available to mention “I could have told you that” even though you didn’t.  You are the experts we need to keep us safe, who make us check the “sell by” dates on yoghurt.  You are well-meaning but a little crochety. You are my favorite kind of people.

If you answered “D” (All of the Above) to everything, you are very special indeed. You are my Favorite kind of people!  You appreciate nuances of Wholeness, Balance, symmetry and that there are at least three sides to everything.  You know that more than one thing can be true when we are talking about Ourselves.  To be Whole is to invite and include Everything. We are Magnificent AND Horrid.  And oh, SO funny at times.

Prudence wishes I had done better.  She wishes the entries were shorter, funnier, more high-falutin and literary as well as more down to earth and less pretentious; more universal, less personal; more Profound (as in a Pro who is Found) rather than Lost… But here we are—soft and shattered—trying to tie everything up in a neat little bow with a few pins in it, here and there, to keep it in place.  The answer to every question is D.  Yay! We get a D+.  We have NOT failed.  D stands for: Dare Determined, Dark Daily Dance, Danger Defended, Dawn Development, Depth Delight, Depression Described, Desire Deserved, Diversity Devoted, Drivel Drafted, Doubts Destroyed… (don’t forget Diarrhea…) And best of all… DONE!  (My favorite!)

 Thank you, Dear Ones, for taking this journey with me.  I am profoundly grateful for the chance to share. I began the blog with a prayer.  I would like to close out this first year with a blessing:

May the year ahead be better still. 

May we be bright as Buttons, warm as flannel, fun as polka-dots, and sturdy as Tweed.

May our little rips and tears be where we tailor our coats and lives to fit us even better. 

May we piece things together with patience, humor and kindness.

May we do Whatever It Takes to be our Best Selves…

And when our work is done, may we look back and be Satisfied that we did our very best.

Yours Aye,

Nancy

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Getting in Tune

“There is nothing more to be said or done tonight, so hand me over my violin and let us try to forget for half an hour the miserable weather and the still more miserable ways of our fellowmen.” — Arthur Conan Doyle

Dawn is coming and the Enchanted Forest is getting yet another glazing of snowishly crusty “stuff”! After a golden evening of gardening and discovering sleepy crocuses and daffodils, as unwilling to rise and shine as surly teenagers from beneath their duvets of dead leaves, I can hardly believe it.  Will the warmth ever inhabit the light again? This watery light lacks the heat to melt the ice lingering along the margins of this muddy, exhausted looking landscape. My little lambs, who don’t know anything different, frolic and delight themselves with springing on stiff legs across the yard, playing chase with a leaf and doing complicated jumps off the front steps that would make a skateboarder proud.  They giggle and wriggle and fling themselves in all directions at once as if they had ants in their black wooly pants.

You would think Spring (a peppy little word that accurately describes the lambs but not what New Englander’s call The Time of Mud) would bring out the Best in people, as it does other creatures—with its weddings, proms, fancy dress banquets and galas—but no.  With so much celebration approaching, each customer comes in grumpier and in more of a hurry than the last.  I have found that true New Englanders can cope with grim, hard winters that last eleven months; they can survive on nothing but bread and milk and NPR for weeks on end but they get all pissy when they have to take off their snow gear and don a proper suit, bare their arms, or attend any occasion that requires them to eat petits fours while wearing Spanx.

Because I really cannot abide grumpiness for very long and because my life is my own damn fairytale and I can change the story any time I want, I decide to magically turn all the customers into musical instruments and instantly restore humor and harmony to my little corner of the world.

A tin-whistle telephones. Her daughter has been jilted by her date—do they still have to pay for their alterations, since they no longer need the dress? An English horn rings, her daughter is not yet sure if her date is planning to take her or his ex-girlfriend.  The mother, unsure of how this drama will play out, wants to know over the ‘phone, how much it will be to hem the dress at the last minute, in case her daughter, the understudy, gets called in for the starring role on prom night. She doesn’t want to “waste the money” to get her daughter’s dress fixed if the girl is just going to stay home.

A bellicose Tuba charges in, wanting to know why we haven’t called him about his pants. “Well, sir, it’s Prom Season…we have a FOREST of gowns in here to chop down one by one and you said you were not in a hurry so...”

“Yes,” he honks angrily, turning pink, “but that was two days ago!”  I briefly consider changing him to Timpany, since Timing seems so important to him even though he hasn’t a clue how it works.  He marches, huffing and tutting, out the back of the shop and brushes past a tiny little piccolo and a family of woodwinds trying to reach the bell so they can be let in the back door.  The little piccolo gets dressed up in her frock for Easter, which is far too big for her while her sister woodwinds busy themselves with rearranging pins in the pin cushions. (“See,” says Prudence knowingly, “your grandmother was right.  Children don’t need toys. They are having way more fun with a pin cushion than those wretched things called ‘Hatchimals.’”)  After the woodwinds’ peaceful departure, in comes a dear little pedal Harp.  She just had her 100th birthday and she wants us to find a way to accommodate her long underwear under her blouse so that it doesn’t show at her great-grandson’s wedding in July.

While she is still in the dressing room, a Bassoon comes in to ask if we have a “rest room.”  Prudence archly wants to know if he is really going in there to “rest” or if his more accurate intentions are to tinkle all over the seat then leave it up.  He returns after a brief absence (during which we do not hear the water running in the sink) to enquire if we can add a third button to a suit jacket that has only two.  I get excited because I love doing buttonholes by hand. There is something about getting a row of tiny knots to lie down next to each other and Behave that never loses its thrill for me.

“Can you believe it? This is my first suit I’ve had since I made my first Communion!”  The Bassoon stands there double-reeded in his single-breasted suit, a column of air, vibrating and producing sound, as we pin him and organize the fabric around his shoulders, chest, and back. “I’m over sixty and I’ve lived my whole life without needing a suit.  I wouldn’t get one now either, ‘cept my daughter’s getting married and she wants it to be fancy.  She says I have to have a suit.”

All day long, the parade continues—clarinets and trombones, trumpets, kazoos and kettle drums.  A sweet, little round French horn comes in to ask if we can custom-make little round sheets for his little round bed.  It is a “perfeck round bed,” he says, “right in zee middle of zee room, where one can appreciate it from any angle.”  He wants a round duvet and cover too. He is hoping to make it nice so he can lure some little round females there to keep him company.  With his heavy French accent and his Inspector Clouseau mustache, he is almost adorable.  (We decide to ignore his comments about enticing women.) “Where does one put the pillows on a round bed?” I want to know.  For some reason, my innocence irritates him and his tone shifts suddenly from mellow, seductive metallic to brassy, forte: “Anywhere you Want, damnit!  Anywhere you want! Zey sheeft wis you ven you move…  I sleep like dis” (he indicates with his hand vertical, rotating in sharp, staccato clicks) like a Sundial all night!”  I can just see his Tinder profile now… “seeking fellow sundial to share round bed—only the clockwise need respond…”

 I am still thinking about music at the end of the day, as I make my drive home.  When I arrive, there is a banjo in his mid thirties who is leaking badly and needs to talk.  He is having a crisis at home.  He is worried that his wife is ready to walk out on him and the little harmonicas.  There is no harmony.  He does not know what to do. 

“What kind of music are you trying to play?” I ask.

“I’m not sure,” he shakes his head ruefully, “I’m afraid there isn’t a musical bone in my body,” he sighs.

“Well, that’s just crap,” I say in a businesslike tone.  “Everyone’s bones are musical.  One of my favorite dance partners of all time is stone deaf and just ‘feels’ the music through his bones.  He keeps perfect time, just by connecting to the beat through the floorboards and watching the musicians on stage. He senses it perfectly though he’s never heard a single note. Music is everywhere, even if you can’t hear it.”

The banjo just shrugs.  He looks defeated.  Prudence can tell he needs a stern talking to and possibly some scones and tea.

“The reason I ask, is that my answer to ‘what you should do’ has a bunch of layers.  Firstly, it’s not for me to heap “shoulds” upon you but to point out that you have some wonderful opportunities here! If you want to reestablish harmony with your wife, you both need to get in tune before you can start trying to share a melody.  Someone can be out of tune because their instrument needs tuning—their strings are out or their sound-post or bridge needs adjusting. So, first you need to make sure the physical instrument is ready to play.  Your four strings are diet, exercise, sleep, and eliminating vices. Do those things first.  Tune your body. 

The next reason a player is out of tune is because his fingers don’t know what they are doing.  You need to teach them scales and exercises and simple tunes.  You need to practice.  DAILY. You will quickly find that fingers are an unruly mob of insolent and disobedient rabble. This is because they need a leader. You need to tune your Mind. Listen hard to the Best Music. Listen every day, as much as you can.  A lot of people think because they have music on constantly that they are listening to it.  They are not.  They are actually tuning it out and ignoring it.

Sit with it in your own silence and Pay Attention at the deepest levels. Listen. Your ears will teach your brain, your brain will teach your fingers, your fingers will reveal all the beauty in your heart.  I don’t care which Prophet you choose—whether it’s Alasdair Fraser or Yo-Yo Ma or Rumi or that rock star, Buddha. Pick one and Study faithfully. Devote yourself.

STOP pointing out how out of tune your wife is.  This does no one any good.  You can only tune you. So do that.  She will have to decide for herself what kind of music she wishes to play in her one short, precious life.  Meanwhile, you will be a lot more fun to play with when you are in tune and sounding great.

Here’s the thing about music.  To be good at it, you have to be willing to be bad at it—for a Very Long Time.  Finding love in the hardest of situations is part of what we all come here to do so forget about how hard it is and look for the love of it. You need to be realistic about how bad you are and do something about it but you also have to love the journey and yourself.  Loving yourself is what makes you realize you could be amazing with a little work, that you are Worth that work. It’s called practice.  And Discipline. No one wants to play with someone who never practices and never improves. One of the beautiful ironies about bringing music to the world is that you need to spend a lot of time alone before you can play with others. You can’t just keep showing up at congregations, jam sessions, or synagogues and going through the motions as if you know what you are doing. You don’t. Don’t think you must only ever play alone either! Playing solo only is not healthy. Music is a language.  It is meant to be shared, to communicate—to commune, to community-ify, to make Common.  

Music is fundamentally organized by Silence. The duration of each mini silence between the sounding of each note, along with the duration of each note, is what gives us our sense of timing. One must honor the Silences as equally as one honors the notes, in order to stay in time. You cannot just run all the right notes together, even if they are in the right order, and expect it to sound like anything. So meditate. Befriend Silence.

If you really know someone, you already know what tunes he or she knows too and you remember to play them when you are together. You don’t get complex and show off for too long—you create community by including the lowest level players.  Love is a Music that Includes.

Your pain now is your future blessing. It’s a signal that you are on the Right path to fearlessly create more of everything that makes your heart sing.  Everything is going to totally suck for a little while and that’s ok. It’s necessary even.

Of course, I couldn’t exactly say ALL of that to the weeping banjo.  But I wanted to. So I’ve said it here, to you, my darlings.  Remember, Life is a Symphony! (Or a slow jam!) We each have a responsibility to get ourselves in tune!  Let’s work on our chops and PLAY, PLAY, PLAY!

May you find your harmony today and do all kinds of Good Work!

With so much love…

Yours aye,

Nancy

 

 

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Snowplows and Slackers

“I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.”  --Harry S. Truman, 33rd President

 Greetings Dear Ones!

It’s 1:am as I begin to write this.  I have been lying here in my bed, gritting my teeth through guided meditations designed to put me into a deep sleep, but I feel like something is trying to pry my chest open with a rib spreader instead, so it can grab my heart with bare hands.  I don’t know how I will be able to see to thread a needle tomorrow, through these hot, salty, puffy little eyes of mine. The son and heir, who forever leaves the seat of his throne Up (grrr), who festoons his room with wet towels draped like Christmas garlands, who plays music until all hours of the day and night and eats his weight in cereal between meals…this BOY phoned tonight to say that he is moving out!   After nearly nineteen trips around the sun, this man-ling is old enough to vote and work and pay taxes (and therefore swear). (We have a rule that you are not allowed to cuss unless you pay taxes.)  In the eyes of the law, he is a man.  He has a job and now a rented room in Boston and he is off to continue his adventures as a Musician and a Seeker in the lands beyond the Enchanted Forest and his mother’s endless nagging that is like a church bell defining a parish.

I lie here thinking dizzily about how quickly my little nest has emptied and how swiftly flew Childhood.  The moments were long but the years are a blur made fuzzier now with tears. I think about what kind of parent I have been and how that matches up against the parent I wish I had been.  

I see other mothers with their children on a daily basis in the shop.  I see your classic stereotypes—the neurotic dance mom, the “tiger” mom, the helicopter moms hovering anxiously outside the dressing room door in case “darling” might need them…Apparently, there is a new kind of parent called the “Snowplow” parent.  It makes total sense to me that in New England half the country-folk are out plowing during every snowstorm (it’s actually snowing here right now!) and they probably have kids… Then I found out that “Snowplow parenting” has nothing to do with snow; it’s when the parent tries to remove or clear all on-coming (character-building) obstacles from the path of the child.  These kinds of parents have been the focus of a scandal that has been in the news a lot recently.

This kind of news just depresses me and highlights more than ever what a Slacker I have been as a parent. I had no idea we could bribe our way into prestigious universities and sports teams! (Whaaat?? Fetch my cheque book!)  Instead, there was I, hunched over in 1920’s stadium seating, knitting socks as my kids thrashed their way—kind of drowning in forward motion—up the length of a murky pool at swimteam practice every night for years, in the hopes that… what? That they could be strong? That they could get swimming scholarships one day? No.  In the hopes that they would be too exhausted to bicker and might go to bed earlier with less fuss.  When the little one got in the car and threw up a belly full of green pool water, saying he didn’t know what to do with the water when it came in his mouth so he just glugged it down as he swam (basically swimming as fast as he could swallow, poor sod), I yelled at him to throw up outside, and not on the floor of the car. (I ask you, what kind of witch yells at a child who is throwing up?) Not that we could see the floor of the car.  I drove a mini-van so messy and filled with food scraps that if it had had a sunroof, sea gulls would have followed us like it was a shrimp boat. I wasn’t a Tiger, a helicopter, or a snowplow. I was a SLACKER mom.  You might be tempted to confuse me with those mothers called “Free Range” mothers—who let their children out to graze on bugs and grass and lay their eggs in the yard.  No.  I wanted to be a Tigress flying a helicopter with a plow on each end.  The truth is I was just too tired and ultimately too lazy to pull it off.  Those women look like exciting mothers—mummifying chickens for their child’s project on Ancient Egypt, and getting them up early to do math games on weekends. Where were my children? Living in a cardboard box version of shanty town under the dining table. The main box, which had once contained a new appliance, later became a pirate ship that clogged our hallway for years. The “sea” around it was a piece of fabric that they could swim under with less difficulty than real water, bless their hearts.

_______________________

 In the shop, each prom gown is bigger than the last. They take hours to hem, even by machine.  We have close to fifty on the racks waiting to be altered. I got two gowns done yesterday, while four more came in.  Some have as much as a nine yard circumference. There is a turquoise one that would make a great sea for a cardboard pirate ship.  It belongs to a young girl with so much aplomb she should be running for office any day now.  She is good at organizing her mother who I suspect, like me, of being a Slacker.

Another mother comes in and wants to pick her daughter’s dress up early, before it is finished, so she can have a fitting at home. “I don’t want her to flip out in front of you if this is not what she wanted.  I want her to flip out at home where I won’t have to be embarrassed in public. You know how she is…” says the mother, in conspiratorial tones and rolling her eyes with dramatic flair. She is a Snowplow who seems intent on pushing her daughter under the nearest bus.  Prudence has diagnosed this daughter before: “She caught a mild case of CLB (Cheeky Little Brat) when she was very young. It’s a perfectly routine, fairly innocuous childhood malady that usually gets better with a few mild corrections and redirection.  Unfortunately, this case went totally untreated, like Lyme disease of the Soul, and has progressed into a full-blown, possibly terminal case of PPS (Pampered Princess Syndrome.)”  The mother is terrified of the monster she has created and she wants us all to fear it too. I refuse.  She’s a perfectly civil and polite young lady when she has to be and she will probably do a fine job of parenting herself in a few years when she enters the Real World, leaves the shadow of the Snowplow, and learns these simple things:

We don’t always get what we Want in life; we get what we Are.

People are either accusative or inquisitive. (We humans like one of these kinds much more so than the other.)

Lots of people have more of and better than you do. (Just as many have less of and worse than too.) The battle is not about circumstances.  People go to war over circumstances when the battle is really about the Mind, the Will, the Heart. What do you Believe in? Go there. Do THAT.  The circumstances around it are, as this seamstress sees it, “im-Material.”

 We are short-staffed this month as one of our three best workers is in Alaska for a family wedding. We need help. We ask people we know who like to sew if they would consider doing some work in the shop. “Oh. No!” They say, “I could never work on other people’s clothes! What if I messed something up?  I could never forgive myself!” Being a seamstress, it seems, takes a lot of courage.  Does it take more than average courage? No.  Hardly not.  Mending a pair of pants that have come in after being triaged in the field (the crotch was sewn together with dental floss), while thrilling work, hardly equates to rushing into burning buildings to save kittens. But pretty much all the things we humans do require Courage, the willingness to fail our way to success, and the self-compassion to forgive ourselves when we accidentally cut the pants two inches too short because we cut at the “finished edge” line and not the cutting line, especially if we did it to all nine pairs of pants at once. (Yipe!)

Please understand, I’m not judging anyone’s parenting style here.  Different children may require different styles.  Just like in clothing, one size does NOT fit all! But somehow, we need to raise children who have Courage—the Courage to Show up, the Courage to Speak up, and when the moment requires, the courage to chop into a vintage wedding gown without a pattern.

 I think we could go far if our kids were endowed with both Courage (a word whose Latin origin means “heart”) and Imagination—the mind’s ability to “image” or picture what is not present.  Strong Hearts, Strong Minds, Strong Bodies.  Not one of them is made in Comfort:  Discomfort, Disappointment—these are fundamental requirements. Letting our kids deal with their own discomfort is uncomfortable for US.  We abhor witnessing pain. As Prudence says, “We all want to get to Heaven but none of us wants to die.” We, who cannot let our children experience Difficulties fully, on their own terms, are weenies. That’s the truth.  We do them a great disservice. When we free a butterfly from its chrysalis, we avert the struggle it needs to force blood into its own wings so it can fly.  We cripple it.

 So, how do we, who wish we were over-achievers, stop from making our kids into trophies we give to ourselves? How do we do the NOT-doing that needs to be done? Benevolent neglect. Boredom. No Screen time.  One of the best things my parents ever did was not buy me and my sisters everything for our Barbies and dollhouses. We became creators, not collectors. We learned to look at things with imagination. We made our own furniture and doll bedding out of scraps and cardboard. Yes, it looked like hell. We did not care.  (Ok, we cared.) We felt deprived and desperate—which made us try harder and get Creative with things like Kleenex and tape, dental floss and markers.  I’m not certain that MacGyvor ever played with Barbies—Maybe he did. If so, I’m sure he is the better for it because playing like we did, without parental intervention, taught us that Everything Required is always present. If it is not present, it’s not required. I’m convinced that every skill I have today can be traced back to “needing” something for my dollhouse that my own Slacker Parents did not provide so I had to call it into being through my own patient ingenuity, trial and error.  

The Best things I have ever done have been the Hardest, at every age.  At 32, it was the birth and welcoming home of this astonishing and magical boy. At 51, it’s letting him go… I truly believe that our children will never be defeated by what others say about them. They can only be defeated by what they say about themselves. Their triumphs can only be genuine if their challenges were too.  I’m full of angst about the poison in the world and all the troubles that await him but he is champing at the bit and ready to jump like a stiff-kneed lamb off the biggest little rock he can find.  He wants to test himself, to prove himself. I am so fiercely proud of him. He’s borne and traded many a scrape for dignity and maturity already.  His future Triumphs await. I can only hope I have neglected him enough.

 Slack on, fellow Slackers! 

Yours aye, with love and admiration,

Nancy

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Let's NOT grow up...

“The most sophisticated people I know—inside they are all children.”–Jim Henson

Greetings my Dear Ones!

I woke up nine years old today. I can tell because I looked at the cap on the toothpaste and thought “this would make a fantastic little planter for my doll house when the toothpaste runs out.  A dab of glue and some moss and dried baby’s breath colored with markers and it will be a perfect little pot of flowers!” and I felt a happy, innocent kind of joy in my heart.  There was a two-week-old Shetland lamb running around the bathroom too, which made me giggle, and I’m pretty sure Most real grown-ups would have frowned at that. I often think I have absolutely nothing in common with grown-ups!  

 Driving through the tunnel of trees lining the road on my way to work, the morning light flickering through the tree trunks makes the scene before me click like I am in one of those old-fashioned home videos that is skipping.  I hope I don’t have to grow up too quickly today!  I get to the shop and my friend announces “Today, we are Diesel Fitters.” “What?” I say, confused. She holds up a pair of jeans and says “Deeze ‘ll Fit ‘er!”  We both laugh and I sigh with relief.  Growing up can be postponed.  I pick up my needle and thread and continue daydreaming about plans for my doll house. 

Prudence shows up just in time to ruin everything when we see the first prom gown of the morning.  I attempt to continue the balancing act of appreciating the absurd and having heart-touched contemplation as I gaze at the sight before me. I note that throughout history, women worked so hard for permission to reveal an ankle, an elbow…but taken to extremes, we now have things like Lulu Lemon yoga pants and prom gowns such as this one…It’s a cross between a swimsuit and a beach tent. The top is little more than a bra; the bottom has enough glittery fabric to hide a Shetland pony.  “Did gravity pull nine yards of fabric to the bottom of this dress?” asks Prudence. “What the hell?”

“What do you think this needs?” asks the girl, pulling at her straps and trying to make the bra part even smaller.

“It needs a COAT” snaps Prudence. “A cape, a shawl, a large blanket! Anything to stop you looking like one of those half-naked dolls one shoves into a cake. You look like half a girl embedded in Glitter Mountain for pity’s sake!”

The phone starts ringing off the hook.  A series of customers coming and going disrupts all momentum on our projects and I realize that I am no longer full of creativity and joy.  I am now just waiting for lunch, like a pack animal.

We all brighten considerably when a little four-year-old comes in with her mother, who is to be fitted for a wedding gown.  (The mother is being fitted; not the four-year-old!)  The four-year-old is picking her nose, singing little songs, and talking to the pictures in her book.  Her delightful prattle is like sunshine. When she sees her mother in her beautiful gown and we ask her if she looks like a princess, she smiles shyly and climbs the carpeted platform to look at her own self more closely in the mirror.  She likes what she sees. Her tummy is protruding and she makes it stick out further.  She sticks out her tongue and makes funny faces at herself.  Her dark eyes sparkle with pleasure and her curls bob.  Even with her finger up her nose to the second joint, she is just gorgeous.  I am looking at what will someday be a grown woman’s inner child.  She is as precious as a newborn lamb.  I hope she never wants a nose job or a boob job or a dress that diminishes her in any way. I Love her just as she is.  She is fantastic.  The body will lengthen, swell, and age around this spirit and encase it in other flesh, other worries, other beliefs about what is “acceptable.” I shudder to think what she will really “learn” at school.

There is a lot of talk these days (and by “these days” what I really mean is since the 1960’s) about the need to find, heal, engage, and play with our Inner Child. This concerns Prudence deeply.  She does not like children of any kind, except perhaps the ones who are “seen not heard.” (She likes sneaky children, I guess?) When I talk about embracing our inner child, she feels a toe-curling dread that this means I long to roam the family tent with sand in my pants and gritty feet, or go to sleep with mashed potatoes in my hair, clutching a filthy “blankie” that (to me) is a sentient being. Squadron leader Prudence, self-appointed leader of the Anti-Creativity Brigade, swiftly hides all the crayons.  Creativity is messy. And Dangerous!  Watch out!  Children think they can do Anything.  And that is True, until we teach them otherwise.

The Cambridge Dictionary defines Inner Child as “the part of your personality that still reacts and feels like a child.”

“Nonsense!” tuts Prudence, “You only had two children inside of you and you managed to expel them both about twenty years ago…”

A damaged inner child, one who suffered wounds of abuse or neglect, causes a person to be impulsive, narcissistic, dependent, needy, afraid of being abandoned.  They cannot regulate their emotions or act from logic or reason. I remember attending a “Find your Life’s Purpose” workshop at the Kripalu center in Western Mass a few years ago.  The presenter asked us what we did the most when we were nine to twelve years old.  What did we play with? What activities did we most enjoy when we could use our time as we chose, when parents, teachers, coaches and clergy were not involved? Who were we before the world meddled with us and told us we needed to be someone else?  This unfortunate woman looked directly at me and asked me to share my answer with the group.  With unusually bold candor, I informed these concerned strangers that I had spent my time reading things like “Little House on the Prairie” and “Anne of Green Gables,” practicing my penmanship, and fashioning nun’s habits out of toilet paper for the collection of Barbie dolls I shared with my sisters, so we could play “The Sound of Music.”  I also had a Doll house, built for me by my grandfather, that I spent time decorating and dreaming about when I was supposed to be doing my homework. I was obsessed with animals in general—horses, bees, and dolphins in particular.  “Hmmm…” she mused thoughtfully, after the laughter had died away, “tell me about the Barbies again. I’m getting an idea that your life’s purpose is going to involve some sort of blend of spirituality and fashion in some way….”  

“Will there be cookies?” I want to know. “And what about the monsters?”

 When I was a child, I was convinced that the monsters were under the bed.  They are not.  They are inside of us.  And so is that sweet, sacred, innocent child. I am convinced that they need to learn to play nicely together. Including and assimilating the darker parts of ourselves is what gives us Character.  These are powerful, potentially destructive energies we can use to be able to negotiate on our own behalf. These are the sides of us we need to control but they help us to know who we are, what we want, and to be able to communicate it clearly. Otherwise, we will have fascinating, absurd or tragic stories. (Which is ok with me! I LOVE stories!)

Knowing who we are is vital.  So is remembering to tell others who we are.  We had a situation this week where someone texted the personal cell phone of one of my colleagues with the message “Hi. I have an appointment to have my hair and make-up done on Thursday afternoon. Ok to pop by after and try on my gown to get the whole look?”  With seven wedding gowns and over 40 prom gowns in the shop, my friend had no clue who this could be.  She did not recognize the phone number. “Who is this?” she texted back.  There was no reply. The next day, a woman rang the shop phone and said her daughter had been in a total panic, wondering if we had lost her gown and that we don’t know who she is. It turns out that she is one of the brides who assumed she was our only customer.

 There are many different ways to work with your inner child.  To my way of thinking, one cannot underestimate the importance of Benevolent Neglect.  Children need a lot of space to do “nothing.” Here’s how A.A. Milne’s Christopher Robin explains the art of doing Nothing.

"How do you do Nothing," asked Pooh after he had wondered for a long time.
"Well, it's when people call out at you just as you're going off to do it, 'What are you going to do, Christopher Robin?' and you say, 'Oh, Nothing,' and then you go and do it.
It means just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering."
"Oh!" said Pooh.”

 “Nothing,” especially when it is done Outside in Nature, is a tremendously rich playground for a child who is otherwise happy and well-fed. They are like little prophets in the desert. I never heard of a prophet who was surrounded by social media and screen technology and had people seeking to exhaust him or her with constant novelty. It’s the trips to the desert of Solitude and Nothing when the prophets gain their creativity, connection, insight, and vision.   They seek the refuge of their own inner beings in the Wilderness.  It is there they find a God who speaks to them.  It’s there that they grow a capacity to see things as other things and Other Things as All One Thing. It is there they find Themselves and realize that Cheerios painted with nail polish make the perfect scale donuts for a doll’s house.

Most of the “adults” I meet on a daily basis are just chronologically old.  Anyone with a bit of luck can manage that! Yes, having a rampaging two-year-old in a forty-five-year-old frame—especially when it has access to a credit card—is no joke. To be truly Adult is to be integrated.  Too many of us feel we need to quarantine our childlike capacity for innocence, wonder, awe and joy along with the monster tantrums. We feel too silly being Silly. Being a psychological adult, not just a chronological one can be ridiculously fun…It means you love your play time AND consider the needs of others. You are responsible and Goofy.  Take a look at Pinterest and Etsy (AFTER you take a walk outside, of course!!)—there is a mind-blowing array of creativity and whimsy out there.  Inner children everywhere are thriving and pouring Beauty into our world.  Make sure you get to play with yours today!  Maybe soon, we can get our dolls together for a tea party in the garden, or wiggle our toes together in the sand box, or turn all our single socks into puppets… the possibilities are endless!

Wishing you much joyful creativity, Good Work, and Good Play today!

Yours aye,

Nancy

 

Lionesses and Lambs

March is like trying to party with a hangover…

Greetings my Dearies!

I received a kind email last week from a reader who said “I would love to see you do a blog about what Spring does to one’s life.” So I decided to act on the suggestion Right Away—partly because I adore mail and am anxious to please, and partly because I haven’t yet thought of a better plan;  I’ve been crazy busy as a result of What Spring Has Been Doing To My Life! I’m definitely the self-inflicted victim of some March Madness that includes the arrival of a tiny, orphaned Shetland lamb (who has taken up residence in my bathtub until better arrangements can be made) and the purchase of a 32-string Celtic Harp. Why I decided to ratchet up the ambient nuttiness by setting an adorable yet hyper-active miniature farm animal loose in the house while I am attempting to sound terrible on eight times as many strings as I am used to can only be ascribed to utter lunacy—which makes sense, since today’s full moon is a Super Moon and coincides with the first Day of Spring.  There is much Magic and Madness about!

I’m not sure what happens to “normal” people in Spring, but here in the Enchanted Forest, the transition is not exactly smooth.  There is a lot of robbing going on. The government took one of my desperately needed hours, just as I was busy forking over my last sack of gold to its Income Removal Service.  I’m fine with redistributing the money; I bitterly resent the loss of the only hour during which, I am convinced, I used to get anything done!  I too am on the take—continually robbing Peter to pay Paul, I am now robbing the chickens as well. They have taken to laying their eggs any damn place they please—including places that are hard to reach due to snow.  The eggs I don’t collect promptly freeze and break their own shells from the inside.  I am waiting for the weather to warm up enough so that I can move the most incontinent dog and the lamb into the hay shed together.  I am tired of shampooing carpets and excited about planting peas. We are all waiting for the Big Thaw…

In the shop, the annual Glitter, Glam & Lace Parade has begun—pale, spotty, sunlight-starved teens are coming in to exercise their right to bare arms, backs, midriffs, legs, you name it, all in the name Fashion and the competition to see who can bleed their parents’ bank accounts the most before Prom.  My current bet goes to the lass with not one but TWO full-price Sherry Hill Gowns, averaging $650 a piece. “It’s disgusting, when children are starving,” mutters Prudence, “why the hell can’t she wear the same dress to two completely different proms in two completely different towns?” (Apparently, there is a law against wearing the same dress twice that people follow with more far more ardor than traffic regulations.) My favorite dress so far belongs to a young woman who comes in with her grandmother.  The grandmother tells us the girl worked hard at her job after school, earned her own money, and bought this used Sherry Hill gown for $200 on Craigslist.  (It’s still a waste of Money, if you ask Prudence, who thinks all prom gowns should be made of flannel and button at the neck and wrist.)  The girl who sold it, sold it filthy dirty and in tatters around the hem and bustle.  I agree to fix it, taking special pains to repair all the damage and make it look as good as new.  Then we have it dry-cleaned. It’s perfect.  Her happy radiance when she tries it on at pick-up makes my heart sing all day.  Other delightful moments include explaining to a young man that everything goes with navy blue, except navy blue (he is trying to put a navy jacket with navy pants and call it a “suit” but they aren’t the same color “navy”) and fitting a girl with Down’s Syndrome for her prom dress.  She has been invited by one of the most popular boys in the school.  Her parents could not be happier as she spins and admires herself in the mirror.  Stories such as this feed my soul for days.

AND THEN…

Well, we have the Other girls. The Queen Bees and Wanna Bees.  A mother-daughter duo arrives at the shop and the girl slips on her dress.  It’s a fabulous bright orange strapless with a mermaid skirt. She fits this dress like a fruit smoothie that is exactly the size of the glass. Every seam lies quietly without straining or flaring.  There isn’t a single bulge or pucker anywhere.  Prudence and I don’t like strapless gowns generally (for differing reasons), but even I have to admit this is flattering to her figure. I assume we just need to hem it but the girl is turning this way and that, looking into the mirror and sneering.  The mother is looking exasperated. “W-h-a-t?” her mother asks, rolling her eyes like she too is sixteen. “What now?”

“It’s just boring. I don’t like the back.  It’s so plain,” she says to her mother.

“She doesn’t like the back,” the mother says to me, as if there is something wrong with my hearing, or perhaps I need a translation.   The girl continues.  “This back is just so…I don’t know…boring. My friend’s dress is interesting.  It has this ribbon thing...” Prudence is ready to explode with one of her rants about the difference between a complaint and a request.  I bite my tongue. 

“How are you planning to wear your hair?” I ask, noting that waves of thick, straight hair totally obscure the dress down to the middle of her back.

“Um… down,” she says. “Yeah, down.”

“Well, then no one is actually going to see the back, really, so why waste money changing anything?” I point out. (I truly am a lazy seamstress!)

Her shoulders sag. “But it’s so Boring…” she moans.

“Only Boring People are ever bored,” grumbles Prudence inside my head. I try to get the part of me that never judges anyone to kick Prudence but that person is too nice.  She slinks away to daydream about planting a garden while Prudence goes off on a rip about Complaints. “My dear Madam,” she says internally, while I hastily line my lips with pins, “I take exception to your habit of announcing that a situation is unsatisfactory or unacceptable to you with the implied Assumption that everyone around you will subsequently make all haste to correct conditions to your liking. Complaints are not good currency in conversation. They tell us Madam is a spoiled brat but they don’t actually tell us what Madam WANTS and I have no patience for guessing games.”

Complaints that are not attached to specific requests are one of Prudence’s Pet Peeves. (Prudence has so many pet peeves there could be an entire blog on them alone…)  When my children were small and made proclamations like “I’m Hungry!” I used to put out my hand and shake theirs and say “Howdy Hungry! I’m called Mummy!” which annoyed them no end but trained them to say things like “may I have a snack?” instead. When they said “I’m Hot/Cold/Tired/Mad/Lonely/Bored/…” I would say, “hmm… Good job identifying the feeling. Now, what is it you Want?” (By the way, in the interest of full disclosure, this Inspired kind of parenting never really went down all that well.  More often than not, it had the effect of inciting a full-blown, total-body-thrash tantrum and accusations that I just did not Understand.  Nothing sends a teenager round the bend faster than calmly meeting their distress with questions like “Ok, I hear a complaint. Where’s the request? What would you like me to do for you? How can I help you?”

In my experience, Teenagers, Toddlers, and Women over Fifty are some of the wildest people I know.  Like March in New England, they are both thrilling and miserable to deal with. What do they have in common? Frequent Bad Manners and the fact that they are all in the midst of a massive Transition. People in transition do not yet know who they are.  They are emerging.  They are lions and they are lambs.  They are fresh new crocuses poking their heads up through dirty snow and last year’s leaves.  They are mud with ice.  You need all sorts of rain gear around them.  They melt and freeze without warning.  They are faced with daunting situations that are unfamiliar and uncomfortable, in traitorous bodies they no longer recognize.  They understand change is inevitable and they are willing, even excited, to grow.  But then come the moments when their balance is so off they fall. They fall hard and cry loudly. They are embarrassing and embarrassed and their shame tempts them repeatedly to abstain from being themselves but they cannot help it.  Truces must be navigated.

This is the Light overcoming the Dark and the Future taking the reins from the Past. This is New Life.  It’s a wondrous, exhausting, and exhilarating MESS.  It is a churning upheaval bursting with possibilities, laughter, and a new kind of music mixed with the bleating of young lambs who capture our hearts and soil our carpets…. This is Spring. At least from where I can see it.

May you bravely clear away the Old and celebrate your own New Shoots, Dear Ones!  Wishing you many Unexpected Blessings and a very Happy Spring!

Yours aye,

Nancy