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When my wife found me crying on the stairs, sitting with a pair of socks in one hand and a t-shirt in the other, she immediately started offering me an assortment of beverages. Gatorade? We’ve got purple! Seltzer? Tea? Babe, you want some tea? Peppermint? PG Tips? Oh, lemonade? Or, juice? I could run over to the bodega and get you a Coke? In a glass bottle?
She was right to think I was dehydrated and having a POTS attack from overdoing it with my housework. It wouldn’t have been the first time. But no. I was crying because when I was folding laundry, I realized there was a hole in my favorite pair of socks and a hole in my favorite t-shirt.
I hiccuped, “They’re ruined, I ruined them, I’m so careless! I’m just careless!”
With her hand resting gently on top of my head, Stacy said, “I don’t know what’s wrong, but nothing’s ruined! You are the least careless person I have ever met! You’re full of care! You’re overflowing with it!”
One of the toughest things about being raised by a pathological liar is that they lie to you about yourself as much as they lie to everyone else about, well, everything else. I am deep into my forties and still unpacking all of my mom’s deception.
My mom’s life was about one thing: marketing herself to herself, and to everyone around her, as a doting mother, a loving wife, a good Christian woman, beautiful, un-aging, wealthy and beloved enough to be adorned in gold and jewels, but forever beset on all sides by abuse and betrayal. Everything she did was to preserve her self image, which was frail and brittle, because it wasn’t based on anything real, and the only way to make it seem real was to lie and lie and lie and lie.
I sometimes think everything my mom said and did was just her working backwards — truth be damned — from her feelings. She was desperate to be admired. She had an unquenchable need for praise and attention. She believed she deserved special treatment.
My mom’s pregnancy was an astronomical accident, but once I was born, she sincerely believed she’d delivered me onto this earth with the single purpose of making her feel the way she wanted to feel.
I showed Stacy the shirt with the hole, the socks. She said, “Baby, you’ve had that shirt since before we met. Didn’t it used to have a design on it?”
“Yeah,” I sniffled. “The Sensational She-Hulk.”
“Right, and that wore off a long time ago. You’ve had it for how long? 20 years? You wear it as soon as it comes out of the wash, every time, so it’s been through the machine, what? A thousand times? It’s amazing it’s taken this long to get a hole in it! Same with those socks! And anyway, you could probably learn to patch them up.”
“You can’t patch up t-shirts,” I said. “Or socks. You have to throw them out, buy new clothes. I ruin everything.”
Her face was so soft and so sad when she met my eyes and said, “Sweetheart, who told you that?”
One thing that always set my mom off was looking at my grubby little hands and face and clothes, all the dirt I dragged in from building tree forts in the woods behind our house, the blood from my bike wrecks, the sweat and grime of the blacktop basketball court.
She didn’t really care about my body or my clothes. Well, no. She cared, but only in the ways she thought they reflected her. She worried WAY more about a scar on my face, for example, than all the damage her secondhand cigarette smoke was doing to my insides. I had to beg to go to urgent care for a broken arm, but I was at the dermatologist the very day my teenage face started breaking out with cystic acne.
One of the worst beatings I ever got was after my mom overheard a couple of old ladies at church talking about how ridiculous I looked in an outfit I’d picked out for myself. I really liked it, actually. It was a grey polo shirt beneath a pink sweatshirt, with the collar popped just right, a soft grey skirt that matched the polo and didn’t itch my legs, and my brand new pair of pink LA Gear high tops with double laces. I wore the LA Gear with pink socks over white tights. My outfit matched. No holes. No stains. It was modest; it covered pretty much all my skin. It didn’t cling; I wouldn’t be tempting any men to sin over my ten-year-old body. I kind of looked like if Clarissa Explains It All took place in a convent. Which was to say: totally tubular.
But the older ladies said I looked ridiculous, and like a boy, and the dirt under my fingernails, can you even imagine? Their critique earned me a whole afternoon of screaming and walloping and my mom hollering that she’d pick out all my church clothes from there on out. She threw out everything I’d worn that day, except for the LA Gear high tops with the double laces. My grandma had given those to me at my Skate Country birthday party; they couldn’t go missing without questions.
It was the same with holes in my t-shirts, and the dirt I dragged in. She didn’t care until she overheard other people caring. And then it was: slap careless slap careless slap slap slap.
Could my pants be patched? Could my socks be darned? Could I learn? Could I help?
No. They were ruined.
You ruin everything.
“You have to learn to stitch before you can learn to mend,” the sewing teacher said, looking around at our small group at the crafts table at the community center. “Anyone can do it!”
I didn’t really believe her. Or, well — I believed that a skilled and crafty person could mend a lot of things, but I’m not particularly known for my dexterity and forbearance in the face of tedious tasks. The class really was for beginners, though, just like the flyer had promised. I accidentally got my grown self stuck in a beginners snowboarding class with a bunch of middle schoolers one time, and I did not want a repeat of that deeply humbling experience.
Stacy said she was excited for me and proud of me for signing up for the lessons, for unlearning my mom’s accusations, and new-learning how to do something I wasn’t already good at. I prefer to show-off what I already know in school, not to not know things in front of other people.
Worst case, the class was only thirty dollars, took place in a masks-required space, and came with a free pencil pouch — so I was leaving with something, even if all I managed to do was spend an hour poking myself in the fingertips with a bunch of darning needles.
I’d brought my ruined shirt and socks, but no one else had any items from home with them, so I kept them in my bag.
The teacher passed around little wooden hoops and something called “Aida cloth,” which is for teaching beginner menders and also for cross-stitching. It’s got tiny pre-made holes and lines you can follow.
The kind of mending I signed up for is called “visible mending,” which means you’re not hiding the rip or tear, you’re repairing it by stitching a colorful patch on top of it. The warp threads go up and down, and the weft threads go side to side, over under over under, to create a weave.
“With each stitch,” the teacher said, “you’re creating something that’s uniquely you. You choose the colors, the materials, and later on we’ll even learn to embroider designs on our mended pieces. Every warp thread is a symbol of what you love, and every weft thread is a gesture of where you’ve been. Your finished product is a sign of who you are!”
I spent most of my time in class untangling my threads, picking out knots, and starting over. In the end, I had a two-inch by two-inch solid patch in my favorite shade of orange. I signed up for the next class on the spot.
My mom loved me, in the way that she felt affection for me sometimes. But she didn’t love me in the way moms are supposed to love their kids. She didn’t allow me to experience or express a normal range of emotions. She didn’t make me feel safe coming to her when I was sick, or hurt, or scared, or facing any kind of problem. She didn’t teach me how to set boundaries (she taught me the exact opposite, actually). She wasn’t curious about me or my life or my inner workings. She didn’t care about instilling good values in me. She didn’t set any kind of example I should follow in any area of life. She didn’t care about my education, or my relationships, or my hopes and dreams. She certainly didn’t care that I wanted to keep my worn-out, super-soft, sentimental-attachment t-shirts. She noticed them to hate them.
I wonder, so often, what she saw when she looked at me. I was the spitting image of my dad when I was growing up. By the time my face shifted to look like hers, we were estranged. And when she died, I was starting to look just like my grandma, my dad’s mom. She was desperate for me to wear dresses; she never saw how good I looked when I grew into a suit and tie. She pleaded with me to wear jewelry; she never got to see the wedding ring I never take off.
I don’t think she ever saw me for who I was, only for who she wanted me to be, an extension of herself. She saw what was missing in me, when what was really missing was all inside of her. When she told me I ruin everything, I think what she meant was that I ruined her own self-propaganda. I think that’s why I always made her so goddamn angry. I never wanted to be who she wanted people to think she was.
Our sewing homework was to complete a two-color patch on Aida cloth, and, if we were feeling particularly froggy, a three-color patch. In our next lesson, we’re going to use the same technique with a darning disc and linen.
I don’t know how to fix my favorite t-shirt and my favorite socks yet, but I’ll learn.
“The most important thing you’ll discover in this class is that everything can be mended,” my teacher said. “Nothing is ever ruined beyond repair.”
I read your posts as soon as they land in my inbox each time because I love how vividly I see and feel what you write. Even when detailing childhood abuse, I feel warmly wrapped in the equivalent of your favorite tshirt, held safe from what you describe while feeling as though I'm standing right next to you at church. Thank you for telling your stories and being kind to yourself.
Just saying — would buy a Heather Hogan book or graphic novel in a flash.
I needed this so much. I just finished the first draft of my memoir AND today I went on a friend date with someone that I met online. I feel like therapy and writing my memoir was the stitching and now I'm actively mending. I actually think that now I could go on a date-date and am shocked by this realization. Good luck with your T-shirt and socks....you can do this!