A story of grief, sewing, and surviving a pandemic.
In the 3rd week of March, when it became certain the Coronavirus crisis was here and it was real, I felt the early pangs of anxiety making their presence known at the hem of my consciousness. There was a thread of agitation running through me — unease, restlessness, fear. Nothing crippling; it was just there. I was afraid that if I actually voiced my fears, they’d become more real and trying to avoid that, I leaped into a flurry of activity. Literally overnight, I set up a podcast about coping with self-isolation, I baked an orange Bundt cake, I prepped for my upcoming tax appointment. The more I was doing, the less I was thinking.
I also became obsessed with making masks to donate to those on the front lines. Note: I am not a seamstress. I do, however, own a sewing machine, one that sat inside a utility closet, behind the vacuum cleaner and even behind the Christmas decorations, one that had not seen the light of day for at least 25 years. This was an older Elna machine purchased in 1983, yet the machine looked to be in absolutely pristine condition because, not being a seamstress, it had never gotten much of a workout.
I dusted it off and got to work setting it up — plugging in the power cord and attaching the foot pedal device. Finding a lone spool of black thread in the sewing bag, I threaded the machine, the intricate process of guiding the thin string off the spool pin, through the thread guide, U-turning up around the take-up lever and then down again. Surprisingly it all came rushing back to me without thinking. Muscle memory. The tension was set, the thread tension I mean, dial set on 2 just where I’d left it 25 years ago. My tension was set too although I’m not sure by what scale I’d measure it.
Needle threaded — my near vision surprisingly still intact — I guided a piece of scrap fabric under the presser foot, lowered it, and stepped gently on the pedal to begin. The machine groaned, the needle worked its way toward the fabric straining to pierce it. I stopped. It needed oil. Like Dorothy helping out the Tin Man, I delicately applied a spot of machine oil to grease the wheels inside. And like the Tin Man, the machine’s joints began to loosen, the mournful sounds lessened, and within a few minutes, the thing began to hum.
I searched YouTube for patterns and mask-sewing tutorials. Watching them was strangely soothing, these capable women and their manicured hands, running lengths of cutely patterned quilting fabric through their machines, making perfectly straight lines. They made me believe, I can do this.
Over the course of the next week, I crafted masks and they were terrible. I felt all thumbs, unable to smooth the fabric as I navigated the curves the way the instructor did. Mine bunched in wrong places, the lines crooked, I’d miss a tuck, exposing the poorly cut raw edge, and have to double back and re-sew, Frankensteining the error. Again and again, I’d run out of one color thread and reload with a different color sometimes in the middle of the mask, right in the front where it was noticeable.
I found the process of sewing very meditative, a vast change from when I first started using the machine at age 23. At that time, when I made a mistake, the machine acted up, or a needle broke, I’d become frustrated, finding the act of sewing downright maddening. At age 60, maybe I’d developed patience and the ability to calmly troubleshoot or, maybe because what I was doing felt important, I’d decided there was no room for a tantrum.
On one rainy afternoon when I’d hit a groove while sewing, achieving what musicians call, appropriately enough, being in the pocket, a memory came flooding back to me. I thought of my mother, a gifted seamstress. My mother who had 7 children, a troublesome husband, and a full-time job yet still found time to make clothes: hers and ours. For some lucky brides in our town, she also made wedding gowns.
Even as a child I could appreciate her talent. I marveled at her ability to pin those flimsy tissue patterns from Simplicity or Vogue against some chosen fabric, then cut, sew, iron and manifest a structured garment, finished just so with some cute button or piping plucked from the notions store. Despite this, I never envisioned myself ever taking up this hobby. That was Mae’s thing.
Then in 1983, on the day she retired, my mother suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage and died a few weeks later, just after my 23rd birthday. Within a few months after losing her, I purchased an Elna sewing machine, an expensive one. I was going to become a seamstress.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but sewing became part of my grieving process, this thing I was doing to try to bring my mother back, to fabricate her into existence somehow. At least the legacy of her. The Elna sewing machine was the tool that would do it.
I leaned hard into this new hobby of mine: frequenting fabric stores and pouring over pattern books, fingering textiles, choosing linings, interfacing, thread, bias tape. I started simply enough and gradually increased the complexity of my projects. And I was very bad at it.
There was a time early on when I attempted to make a long women’s shirt with a collar, a vertical placket for buttons down the front, and a vent in the back. I selected a pale-yellow linen/cotton blend and was eventually able to hobble out a garment that was rather shirt-like in appearance. I decided maybe I could sew after all. I only had to finish the thing, put the wooden buttons on and get to wearing it. I just need to make the buttonholes. Darn buttonholes. The machine even came with a buttonhole attachment yet nothing I tried would work. I was about to give up.
I remembered seeing an industrial sewing machine at my local dry cleaner and a sign in their window advertising their same-day alteration services. I’d seen the old man, the owner, often crouched over his machine taking some garments in, letting some garment out, as that cycle tends to go in life.
This was the dry cleaner my family frequented for decades but never for alterations that my mother could handle. We’ll just need the Martinizing, thank you very much. So, I took the almost-finished shirt and explained my predicament to Joan, the woman behind the counter and the owner’s daughter. I lied and told her that my buttonhole attachment was broken and would she please be able to just make 3 buttonholes down the front for me, at the spots marked with washable tailor’s ink.
Joan looked at me and sneered, “I can’t believe Mae Sloan’s daughter has the nerve to come in here and ask me to finish her work.” She tossed the shirt back at me. “No, we can’t do that.” I left, humiliated, but shocked at her cruelty. Didn’t she know my mother had just died? This seemed to be less about me and more about my mother; Did Joan have a grudge against her? Was it resentment, maybe? Jealousy? Angry and hurt and missing my mother, I got into my car and burst into tears. Sewing would not bring her back. I was doing the best I could in the midst of this enormous loss, but it wasn’t enough as Joan so viciously reminded me.
I made a few more garments after that, some even reasonably complicated, a fitted jacket or two, a skirt here and there. I even figured out how to do buttonholes though never very elegantly. I never did get good at sewing. There were somehow always loose threads.
Eventually, I put the machine in a closet rarely taking it out in 25 years until now. Until I found myself taking it out in the middle of a pandemic to sew some masks for hospital workers.
I realized I was grieving. And my go-to activity when everything seems lost and out of control, when there is trauma and sadness, evidently, is to sew. 20 masks later, if my skills improved, it was only marginal. These masks still had crooked lines, were lacking in uniformity, and had loose threads, but they functioned correctly, they fit, and people needed them badly.
I contacted my local mask-making volunteer group to tell them I had 20 masks ready to go. The masks, ironed and arranged in a plastic bag, were placed on my porch for pickup by a volunteer. There would be no personal contact. I looked outside about an hour later and the masks were gone. I’d never seen her car pull up nor saw the security lights outside our house flash on. Sometime later, she texted me: the masks had been delivered to clerks in a Santa Monica supermarket who were very grateful to have them. They wanted to thank me.
Loose threads and all, I did the best I could. It was going to be enough.
