“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.” Toni Morrison, Beloved

Greetings Dear Ones,

A Beautiful, Optimistic, and Practical woman arranges to meet me at the shop to have her new summer pants hemmed. We both wear masks and maintain our distances as best we can in my cozy space. I only briefly see her eyes and hair above the mask. So how do I know all those things about her? I’m kinda guessing… But deep down I know the following truths: #1. A wrinkle-sprinkled woman who speaks lovingly of having grown children is Beautiful just for all she has endured, witnessed, adapted to, and created. Warm and loving, smiling eyes are Beautiful. They just are. We don’t have to look any further south than that. Happy people who laugh easily can’t help looking Gorgeous, even when their faces are covered. No amount of make-up or hair dye makes a sour-pus look radiant. #2. She brought in white pants. Anyone who wears white pants is Optimistic, to say the least. (The only white I ever wear is dog hair, and then unintentionally.) Everyone knows that white fabric has been specially woven with microscopic, magnetic threads that act as a vortex for things like ketchup, paw prints, and sometimes paw-prints made of ketchup. White pants are generally sullied within moments of removing their price tags, never again to regain their former pristine elegance. I’m not sure a pair would survive a ride in my car, even if I double bagged them. A woman willing to wear white is a woman willing to take on a lot of laundry and any other Dirt life may send her way. She dares to spend the whole day standing up. She can cope. #3. She had five pairs. Sure, she can cope—but she has a back-up strategy. She’s practical. She knows the fate of white pants but she wants them anyway and is willing to embrace contingencies.

“I don’t need to try them on,” she informs me. “I just need them all hemmed to 30 inches.”

I look at the pants on my cutting table. My eyes narrow. She makes haste to head for the door and I call her back just in the nick of time.

“Ma’am,” I say, “wait! I don’t think any of these are actually thirty to begin with…” I grab an inseam and stretch it the length of the ruler at the edge of my cutting mat. As I suspect, they are just twenty-eight inches. She looks on from the doorway.

“How can that be?” she asks. “Well, I ordered them online. Of course, nobody can go to stores and try anything on right now so I just ordered them. And they came and I opened the packages and I just assumed I needed to get them hemmed. I need to get everything hemmed.” She is looking at the pants the way the that wife on the 1980’s T.V. advertisements for Stove-top Stuffing used to look when she found out her husband would prefer stuffing to mashed potatoes. She is visibly rattled. Her world does not make sense. She inches closer to the pants and reaches out to touch one. “Now what do we do?” she asks.

“Have you tried them on yet?”

“No.”

“Why don’t you go in the dressing room and slip on a pair and we’ll see if maybe you want to send them back or make them into capris.”

She does. She emerges a moment later and they fit perfectly. Nothing needs to be done to them at all. It turns out that she is not a thirty either. The next four are exactly the same.

“You’re turning out to be my toughest customer ever,” I say, “now if you’ll just pay me five-hundred dollars, we can call it a day!” We both laugh, knowing I am kidding on both accounts. She leaves happily with her pants, promising to recommend me to everyone she knows. Apparently, I do good work.

I love exchanges like this. I love the micro “journey” I take with each customer as we explore the facts vs. assumptions surrounding each order. So many times, people have assumed the labels are the facts. If there is one thing I have learned about being a seamstress it is that LABELS are NOT FACTS. Not even alternate facts.

Labeling clothes is a fraught business, as folks forced to clothe themselves with the help of cyberspace are beginning to discover. Labeling people is even more dangerous.

On Monday, I celebrated being a person’s mother for twenty years. First he was a “baby”, then a “toddler”, then something Very Interesting that sometimes wore pink ball gowns and sometimes resided for days in the swamp behind our house, then he was a “Teenager”… something he and his sister had dreaded. (When they were little and would fight, they would accuse each other of “acting like a teenager,” which was the worst thing they could think of.) Now, the label “teen” no longer applies to either of them. He’s a braw young man “in his early twenties” (VERY early—as in two day’s worth).

I hadn’t seen him since March 12th so I drove to Boston and we met outside and walked along the harbor, had cake, and one of those lovely, heartfelt mother-son conversations that make me so grateful and inspired to be his fellow traveler on this adventure. We sat on a floating dock until the gentle rise and fall of the waves made us feel icky from eating so much cake. We are landlubbers with sensitive middle ears; we really should stay on farms, eating potatoes instead of chocolate mousse, and venture nowhere near boats! But the strange times of 2020 demanded this.

We talked about how things have changed so much between us in the last year, since he moved out and went to Boston—how my jobs as his mom have evolved with him during the span of years from wet-nurse to cook and laundress to teacher, chauffer, and life coach. I’ve worked my way up from janitorial services to occasional consulting and banking. We are no longer within the reach of each other’s arms but fingers, which dial cell phones, provided one of us hasn’t dropped ours in a river, or down a toilet, or left it somewhere stupid with the ringer off. We talked about relationships and labels and how the best relationships defy labels. Love has a way of crawling out of whatever box you attempt to call it anyway. The Greeks tried to sort love into seven simple boxes: Eros (passionate), Philia (intimate, authentic friendship), Ludus (flirtatious), Storge (unconditional familial), Philautia (self-love), Pragma (committed companionate), Agape (empathetic, universal), but I’m not totally buying it. I think there must be hundreds, not to mention endless hybrid blends of the original seven.

It takes a while for us to live through and correct the inaccuracies of the labels we encounter. It takes wisdom and curiosity and sometimes requires getting Naked to access the truth. Just like that lady’s white pants, you know you are on to something when you stop looking at the tag and put them on, next to your bare skin, and see how it actually FEELS. Does it fit you? Good. That’s Happiness, no matter what the numbers say.

As humans, it’s common for us all to grasp at labels, especially in relationships with other humans. We need to know what things “are.” We need to measure, quantify, classify, predict. But just because we are capable of growing bizarre life forms at the back of the fridge (I probably have the cure for Covid-19 there right now!) does not make us “Scientists.” Using the scientific method on emotions can have tragic results—usually as a result of our unconscious biases in the trials.

We all want to find our “soul mate,” “The One,” “the love of my life,” –a specimen so highly classified and rarified that we can barely breathe to consider such perfection. But these labels come with damning standards and implicit judgments, expectations, and comparisons. Pain, ecstasy, jealousy, insecurity—these all bear witness to the levels of intensity inherent in a certain label. One expects Grand Things from an Yves Saint Laurent silk blouse or Dolce & Gabbana suit. When there is “no label” we are free to proceed with Curiosity, Hope, a sense of unattached adventure and exploration. We are free to check in with ourselves and notice how WE are showing up, rather than how the Other is either delighting or disappointing.

One of the reasons I love shopping for second-hand clothing is that the tags mean nothing. If you know a bit about the history of fashion, the tags may give you clues, but that’s all. Companies get bought and sold, manufacturing differs depending on the source of the cloth and where it is assembled, even according to dye lots. Even size representations have changed many times over the years. One must take each garment at face value. The main question is, Does It Fit YOU? If not, what has to change? Can we do that? Or do we need to leave this treasure in the bargain bin where we found it? It’s the Serenity Prayer embodied in every outfit.

We often assume we are getting what we expect. Sometimes we aren’t. We need to look closer, get involved—literally Get IN, to see what’s really what. Beyond labels is a world of surprises.

We have all worn a lot of “labels” in our lives—as daughters, sisters, sons, and friends—lovers, husbands, fathers, wives. In my own case, the label of “mother” has meant very different things to me depending on which child I am dealing with, which disaster, which triumph, which era or phase… To the point that I don’t really know what “motherhood” means any more except that I keep showing up and it keeps getting better. It certainly is NOT what I thought it was. There have been times when I was rigid and uncompromising and unwilling to change my ideas. Sometimes I was right to do this—especially when they wanted a “real” fire in their snow fort. Sometimes I was so rudderless, so out of ideas, so self-abandoned that I had no compass—open to any ideas, including the notion that the Fairies had stolen my children and replaced them with changelings. I’m sure the same is probably true for Fathers too—though I don’t know. I have not been a father.

Father’s Day is coming up. Some have earned that label, some have not, no matter what their participation in the biological event may have been. But the label itself does not really matter.

The Love Does.

For those of us struggling with some of our labels—Labels by which other people judge us or think they know who we are—white, black, pagan, Christian, Democrat, Republican, fat, thin, gay, straight, us, them—the biggest sorrow for us all is that we might not “fit.” Take it from this humble little seamstress—You DO. You Matter. And so does that person you think does not like you very much. Take heart, Dearies--there’s not much that can’t be changed in a life, a country, or in a tailoring shop. It’s just a question of effort. Start by forgetting the label. Look at what’s real.

And sometimes, things are already fitting better than we ever imagined. We just need someone to point that out so the celebration can begin.

Thank you for your Good Work.

With Sew Much Love,

Nancy