Order of Interbeing member Carole Moore explores the deep connection she shares with her mothers through sewing and expresses her gratitude to them.
By Carole Moore on
Thầy teaches us that our ancestors are in every cell of our bodies. There is a thread running through us, generation after generation, and into future generations. Thầy teaches me that my ancestors are in me.
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Order of Interbeing member Carole Moore explores the deep connection she shares with her mothers through sewing and expresses her gratitude to them.
By Carole Moore on
Thầy teaches us that our ancestors are in every cell of our bodies. There is a thread running through us, generation after generation, and into future generations. Thầy teaches me that my ancestors are in me.
At fifteen years old, in 1942, my mum left home to work in a factory, where she began to learn the dressmaking and tailoring skills she was to use throughout her life.
Breathing in, I see my mother suffering as a child.
She started to teach dressmaking in the evenings and then trained as a teacher in the 1970s. She taught dressmaking in secondary schools until she retired.
Breathing out, I smile to my mother.
My mother made my sister and me clothes during our childhood and taught us many sewing skills as we grew up. We learnt to make patchwork cloth, which we turned into long, flowing skirts; we tie-dyed T-shirts; we learnt to embroider and knit, and we learnt dressmaking.
When we were in our teens, our parents went on holiday and left us alone. Instead of having wild parties, we turned the living room into a sewing room and spent the week making clothes. I cut up an old mock fur coat that had belonged to my grandmother and made a new coat for myself, while my sister made a velvet patchwork dress. We cleared up completely before our parents’ return.
Recently, I started sewing again and decided to make a pair of trousers. I chose a beginner’s pattern and carefully cut out the jade green linen, then started on the pockets. I struggled when the pieces didn’t fit together, but I couldn’t believe that I was unable to do it. Silently, I asked my mother for help. A little while later, a voice in my head said, “The pattern is wrong.” No, I said, how can the pattern be wrong? Trust the pattern. So on I went and managed somehow to fit the pocket.
In the middle of the night, I thought I would look on the Internet for feedback on the pattern. Yes, there was an error in numbering on the paper pattern:
Pocket linings AB incorrectly numbered. 5 is 6 on the pattern.
The larger of the pieces is referred to as 5 in the instructions.
Piece 7 (pocket facing) is attached to piece 6 (smaller of the two pocket pieces) then sewn to piece 5.
The pocket had been joined incorrectly. My mother was right. Later, I was asked by the pattern to make eyelets or buttonholes for the ties on the trousers. Again my mum said to simplify; use the most straightforward way. So I did. No eyelets or buttonholes, just elastic and a very neat waistband.
As I stitched, I realised that the thread I was using was from my mum’s sewing box, a rich jade green. She had made sewing boxes for both myself and my sister. Mine was made from a rich turquoise-patterned satin and lined in deep red. It was filled with scissors, buttons, needles, pins, and thread.
The buttons varied in size and shape. Many were large black buttons, but there were colourful ones, too: Victorian painted ones, small mother-of-pearl buttons, and I remember one that looked like a piece of black and white striped liquorice.
The skills I was using were the skills she taught to me as a child, and they were being used again now that I was much older.
Breathing in, I am sewing with my mother’s hands. Breathing out, I smile to my mother.
Like the sewing box filled with her things, my mother is in me, in every cell of my body. The buttons, the pins, the needles, even the scissors. There is a thread running through me. I realise that this connection is not just in the skills that have been passed on, but in my feelings, emotions, and the seeds deep within me. Sometimes I wonder where that feeling came from, and then I find a small mother-of-pearl button in my sewing box.
My mother died on the 27th of January, 2015. The thread that connects me to her is also the thread that connects me to all my ancestors and to the cosmos.
I was adopted, which complicates things for me. I know very little about my birth mother and I have no sewing box from her; I just have a few stray buttons, a few photos, a few stories, and an invisible thread which connects us.
Breathing in, I touch my mother’s hands. Breathing out, I smile to my mother’s hands.
Another sewing box that I inherited was from my mother-in-law. Using her threads connects us: old threads on wooden spools and many, many more buttons.
Buttons and attachments.
Breathing in, I smile; so many buttons. Breathing out, I smile to the buttons. Breathing in, I stitch. Breathing out, I stitch. Breathing. Stitching.
