I was standing in my sewing room, staring at a half-finished quilted mixer cover that I was making for my mother-in-law for a Christmas gift when my husband walked in and asked me what I was doing.
"I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to get this gift for your mom finished in time for Christmas," I said, boring my eyeballs into the seams, willing them to, at the very least, loosely baste themselves.
He paused before saying, "Not sure if you knew, but it's Dec. 31."
Yeah, I knew, smart ass. I didn't mean literally in time for Christmas. I meant just not late enough to have it be misconstrued as a gift for Christmas 2017. And I already have a gift in mind for her for next year: a matching oven mitt that I'm hoping to finish by mid February 2018.
After standing there, the both of us looking at the pinned-together mixer cover for a few awkwardly silent moments, my husband said, "So, which of your sisters is going to get over here and finish it for you?"
That's what 33 years of marriage will get you: Complete and deep-down understanding that even at my age I am the baby of the family and finishing my own projects is not in my job description. My sisters have been enabling this dysfunctional situation since I was a little girl. Having been born into a family that sews, I came to believe I was switched at birth. It never came easy for me. I could make a papier-mâché monster mask that could earn a ribbon of one primary color or another, but I would screw up a simple hem on my Super Fly elephant bells. And this was before petite clothes were invented for the short and I was doing a lot of hemming. You would think that I would eventually learn from my mistakes, but no. Every time, I would find some way to mess it up. In the middle of my denim-and-paisley hissy fit, and one of my sisters would pick up the whole mess and say, "Oh, stop. I'll do it."
When I was in the seventh grade I was making myself a brown corduroy jumper and sewed the yoke on wrong three times. Yes, three times, and all three were different kinds of wrong. Which means that one of the mistakes was sewing it on upside down, which defies the laws of physics. That third time, when I realized I was going to have to go get the good seam ripper again - which wasn't going to be easy; I had hurled it at the bookshelf after I had sewn the hoke on wrong-side-out - I screamed and threw the jumper across the living room. Not once did my sister say, "For heaven's sake, Diane, an escaped monkey from Group B of the primate brain testing lab could do a better job." No, she got up, walked to where the jumper lay, picked it up and sewed the yoke on correctly (first try!) and handed it to me. By that time I was in the middle of an episode of Bridget Loves Bernie and I looked up at her with my saddest puppy eyes.
She sighed and took it back to the sewing machine and finished the entire jumper, hemmed and pressed and ready for wear with my tuff brown and pink flower power polyester blouse, all before Bernie dropped the menorah on the Christmas tree, nearly burning down Brooklyn.
I wore the Brown Corduroy Jumper of Shame for years, letting down the hem during growth spurts and switching out the flower power blouse with a sunshine yellow ribbed turtleneck and then a popcorn blouse. Because it was made by my sister, it was durable and lasted many years.
But that was long ago, when families sat together in the evenings, watching racially sensitive TV shows together and doing crafts. And here I was, 45 years later with a half-finished quilted mixer cover that wasn't going to grow its own binding. I could have thrown it across the living room, but there wouldn't be any sisters to come pick it up and finish it. It would have lay there until the dog took it to her toy boneyard under the piano, where it would hold a place of honor, if even for a short time, since it's already halfway to the state she loves her toys: Not completely intact.
I looked over at my husband and conjured up the saddest puppy eyes I could muster. But I was out of practice and my eyes are shrinking anyway.
"Forget it," he snapped. "I don't sew. When you and your sisters were making jumpers, I was trying to get my brothers to fix my bike."
No wonder my mother-in-law is so understanding when my homemade gifts don't arrive on time.
