Happy Birthday Mom

Today is my mom’s birthday. She’s been gone well over a decade, and as her birthday comes around I start to think about all the things she never got to see me do, all the talks we never had.

A big area of my life is everything I’ve done with fiber since I went to college, and in particular over the past five years or so. She taught me to sew, largely against my will, until she hit on Renaissance costumes as the appropriate motivator. Also, she promised that she wouldn’t say a word of protest about me wearing anything to school if I’d made it myself. She never got to see anything I did for the costume department in college, my wedding gown, or the dress I designed a year later for our first year anniversary.

More importantly though, she embraced arts and crafts in all their forms. She whole heartedly supported every craft fad her children went through: colored sand bottles, painting wood shapes with acrylic paints, crude attempts at doll clothing, and more. Halloween costumes were almost always home made. Every summer saw home improvement projects, frequently painting a room, and she roped children, neighbors and friends alike into helping on these. I mention these, because I think for her the line between “craft” and “home improvement” was blurry – you were creating, making, shaping in both.

I don’t think she would have applied the word “artist” to herself (though she definintely counted herself as creative), but she loved knowing artists. She loved and took immense joy in her best friends fabric art (that’s AwesomeE’s mum). She also strongly encouraged my own artistic tendencies, encouraging me to take all the art classes I wanted in highschool, and buying paints, paper, pencils and more.

I wonder a bit what she’d think that I’m spending far more time knitting, spinning and sewing than drawing or painting these days since I think she sort of thought I’d be an artist (“what is an artist?” Topic for another post). I’m pretty sure she’d think it was hilarious that my actual job requires me to do copy editing when she had to help me so much at that in school – she was actually a copy editor, while I regularly failed spelling tests.  I also think she’d see the art in what I do with fiber, even as what I’m making are yarns, socks, shawls, and the like instead of paintings or sculptures. I also think she’d be proud that I’ve pushed my knowledge and skill in sewing and knitting beyond her own.

I’m fairly certain she’d really enjoy my yarn wall art too. Once, when we were using the above mentioned acrylic paints for some project or other, we got to the end of it and my brother realized he’d squeezed out more than he could possibly use. If you’ve painted with acrylic, you know that once they dry, that’s it. You can’t reconstitute them (like water color) and or cover and keep them a bit longer (like oil). He was very distressed about the impending waste. My mom looked at them and said “Go paint on the playroom wall. Put some birds on it or something”. Aghast, he protested you can’t paint on the walls. “Of course you can, I just told you that you can”. He couldn’t do it. Guess who did? Me. Red and blue birds and multi-colored swirls. Now, instead of acrylic paint, it’s those same colors in yarn splashed across the wall.

Each year I pour a glass of wine in honor of my mom for her birthday. Usually, I make sure I have a bottle of red wine, which was what she preferred. With a lack of foresight, we finished our bottle of red last night, so it’ll be white wine this year. I think she’d understand.

Happy Birthday mom.