In the mid-1980s, the Colquitt County educational system would not let you out of school unless it felt reasonably confident that one day you would be a good wife. For some I suppose that the age-old home economics question of “cooking versus sewing” presented a choice along the lines of “firing squad versus hanging,” but for me, the choice was easy: sewing. So I began in a class in eighth grade, making a terrifying looking rag doll and a dowdy wraparound skirt, and I ended in a class in twelfth grade, making a cream-colored notched lapel blazer perfect for a guest turn on an episode of Miami Vice and a tailored apricot colored skirt that would have made me feel right at home with the Amish. Along the way, I learned other needle crafts — needlepoint, embroidery, cross-stich, and crewel — and at some point I had to take a home ec class called “Minors Prohibited.”

When I signed up for “Minors Prohibited,” I felt like I was gaming the system, for I was 16. But the class gamed me, because rather than teaching us the salacious details of adult life, we discussed things like keeping a checkbook and applying for a job. And it made us privy to the musings of our exceedingly well-groomed teacher (her lipstick game was very strong indeed), whose core advice on having a successful adult life seemed to be this: Marry rich. I would sit at my desk thinking about how if one really succeeded with this advice, checkbooks and jobs would fall by the wayside, and then I would find myself snapped back to reality by our teacher’s favorite bit of advice: When life gives you lemons, don’t get sour grapes!

That woman could mix a metaphor.

But sewing was a natural choice, for my mother could sew as could her mother before her. My mother had an aqua green Singer that weighed about 80 pounds (it was not a sewing machine: it was a weapon) and it would occasionally appear in front of her on the floor or on a card table and things would get made. I remember it mostly from my young childhood, when money was tight and I had a very definite idea of how I wanted to look. So if you were to flip through my mother’s photo album, the one where the pages no longer adhere, you would be showered with photographs of me wearing things like a strawberry-printed romper, enormous sunglasses, and a sombrero. Or leopard print pajamas. Or a red fake fur overcoat. Or a Little Bo Peep costume, standing next to our English bulldog — Admiral Bull Halsey, since my father was in the Navy — who had a small bit of costume attached to him. And then my brother came, and much later my sister, and they ruined my unfettered access to a personal tailor, and as the years stretched on, I could occasionally get a summer shift or a prom dress out of my mother. And finally, the big green machine died, and I was left with this realization: I had never once sewed on it.

I have been thinking about this lately, for I have been sewing a lot, and I am teaching my 17 year-old daughter how to sew. There are times that it feels a little like teaching her how to drive — the need to stand back and take a very deep breath, the realization that what is so easy for me is so hard for her, the niggling notion that I could take over and be done with it almost instantly — but fortunately, there are no looming catastrophic consequences if she screws up. My mother may have tried to teach me, but I remember only an orange and white child’s machine and then the home ec classes. (I also remember being a spectacularly impatient and bossy child, meaning that there could very well have been looming catastrophic consequences from an attempt at home instruction.)

But it is also Christmas, and that means one thing: It is time for Christmas Sweatshop. As I may have mentioned way too often, I struggle at Christmas, and a few years ago, I decided to make my own gifts for the people I love. (If you have seen Goodwills around the country loaded with merchandise that looks like it is from my very own Etsy shop, you now have an explanation.) Christmas Sweatshop was born of the notion that everyone on my list had access to everything they needed and most of what they wanted, and I could contribute little to that effort. So I decided to make things by hand and to think about the recipient as I handled the fabric or yarn and constructed the gift.

It has become as personal for me as handwriting. One of the few smart things that I did when I was younger was to save letters from my grandmothers. They both were relatively prolific letter writers, my grandmother M having perfect cursive and my grandmother C having a far more relaxed hand. The letters help me remember their faces, their homes, their clothes. And my grandmother C’s reminds me of what is important, for she ends every letter with telling me just how much she would love to see me. Even as a 20 year-old college student, I would tell her that I was just too busy. This is one of my biggest regrets, being too busy to see some of the people who loved me the most. (Especially since we all know that there is no way that a 20 year old college student is busy, much less too busy.)

These days, I actually qualify as busy, and that is one of the beauties of Christmas Sweatshop: It makes me slow down. No project has made me slow down more than the one requested by my son: For Christmas, he asked only that I make him a quilt. While this may seem like an unusual request for a 19 year-old boy, it is perfectly understandable to me. There is a quilt I made on our couch, and if the house was burning down and the people and dog were safely outside, it would be the only thing that I would run back inside to save. Indeed, it is the only possession that I worry about my children fighting over when I die.

His quilt has taken practically forever, for I decided to make it from old business shirts, the pockets or the plackets or the pleats occasionally appearing in the squares. In a rare stroke of serendipity, I found a scrap of sheeting like that he had as a young boy. And while the quilt is not complete, this will give you an idea of what it will look like:

The delight on his face, especially when he saw the long-ago bears, made the hours worth it.

But everyone else got flannel pillowcases, an explosion of color and chaos. Here are the scraps, themselves waiting to become quilts:

As I made pairs upon pairs of pillowcases, all I could think of was this: Have sweet dreams, dear person that I love. And I think that that is the one pleasure, and perhaps the one drawback, of sewing for me: I sew only for people I love.

I have a group of dear friends, and every year we have a Christmas party. We always take a group photograph, and this year I said, “Someone should do a split in front,” and a friend told me she would give me 20 bucks if I did.

Everyone laughed, and I was eternally grateful for the coffee table, and I got up with more grace than you might imagine, and even with all that, I somehow did not wind up $20 richer. Granted, it was time for Yankee Swap, an event aptly described on one episode of The Office as “Machiavelli meets Christmas,” an exchange full of treachery and stealing and gifts. My pillowcases went to the one person in the group that I did not know. A stranger! As I shook my head and bemoaned the fact that I sewed only for people I love, my friend Julia either discovered or made up a new rule — I’ll never know — and claimed them for herself. “We’re keeping these in the neighborhood,” she whispered in my ear as she hugged me. “Merry Christmas.” And as she held the brightly colored pillowcases — Windex blue with butterflies and flowers, chartreuse green polka dots, pink stripes — I wished her 2 year-old daughter, who no doubt would be the recipient, the sweetest and most colorful of dreams.

I saw Julia and her girl at a party yesterday. The daughter had insisted on dressing herself. She wore a bright yellow top, a full purple skirt, red boots, and giant red sunglasses. Julia said she thought of me, and I thought about sewing, and love, and Christmas. How you make these things and hope that they are appreciated. How you realize that even if they are not, that you like how it makes you think about the recipient. How we all have too much of things, but too little of time. How a favorite possession can be valuable to only you, yet that’s enough.

When I returned from yesterday’s party, my daughter’s boyfriend handed me a gift. He had gone to a yarn store and picked three skeins of yarn in bright colors he thought I would like. They were the same colors of the little girl’s top, skirt, and boots. As I held the yarn in my hand and felt its soft heft, I thought about making something just for me. I found a pattern that would take time and patience, that was perhaps a little too hard, and I set to work on a striped shawl. As it goes with every knitting project these days, there came a time when I had to rip it all out and start again. In the past, this has made me bitter. But last night, it was all part of the process. It was all well and good.

ALC

P.S. — In the comments, someone asked to see the quilt that the children would fight over. Like a lot of things that have only sentimental value, it is pretty unspectacular but very well-loved and wonderfully beaten-up. Without further ado, here it is:

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Last Sunday morning I began driving at 5:45 a.m., leaving a perfectly beautiful Savannah day (65 degrees and sunny) for a perfectly miserable Atlanta day (40 degrees and rainy), complete with three accidents on a four mile stretch of I-285E. I drove through the dark, then the sunrise, the drizzle, and finally the heavy, steady rain.  And I thought about what I think about every time it rains: the quote from Young Frankenstein where Marty Feldman says (as it begins to rain), “It could be worse. It could be raining.”

Even without the rain, the day was bad enough, for I was headed to a continuing education class, a trip necessitated by a gentle, and then a more insistent, reminder from my gym director that it was time to update my certification to teach fitness classes. I will confess that I had put it off as long as possible, and I will acknowledge that I would have put it off even longer if I could have. As days of reckoning tend to be, this one was at hand, and as I settled into class, I thought, This is really going to stink.

I would love to tell you now that I was completely wrong in this assessment, that I learned a lot, and that I returned to my classes with renewed fervor. But if I told you that, I would be lying. I try very hard not to lie. So I will tell you only that I personally had never quite envisioned a fitness class in the same manner as this particular instructor, who viewed herself as less a gym employee and more a spiritual advisor, a woman who blared into a microphone during the workout itself, “I don’t give people what they want. I give them what they need.”

Now this, my friends, is a tantalizing promise, for I would love to find someone who could override my own ideas of what I want and hone in on the far weightier matter of what I need. So I sipped the Kool-Aid and did it exactly her way and learned this hard and important lesson:

I really do not need sore knees.

(To be fair, I really did not want sore knees, either.)

But that was what the nine hour class inspired.

It passed in dog years, so the equivalent of 63 hours later,  I headed to my in-laws’ house, spent the night, and sore knees and all, hit the road (again in the rain) at 6:15 on Monday morning. By 8 a.m., I was at the mouth of Interstate 16 — the Jim L. Gillis Highway — the 167 mile stretch of road that connects Macon to Savannah. It is a beginner’s version of an interstate (flat, sparsely populated) that features exactly two places to stop between its terminus points (Dublin, Metter). The boredom that it inspires can be hypnotizing, meaning that it is the perfect place for introspection.

I thought about the epic battle of wants versus needs, and I thought about how much my life had changed in the last few years. I think this summarizes it the best: I needed to find an easier version of me. To get to that point, I had to give up a number of things, big and small, that I thought that I wanted. Here are a few examples.

I gave up a salaried job with an impressive, fear-inducing title (federal prosecutor!) for self-employment. I needed freedom, autonomy, and flexibility. As a bonus, I got a whole lot of uncertainty, financial and otherwise, but even uncertainty has been good: It forces one to plan for contingencies, to save, to stare down the unknown and continue moving forward.

I gave up a cleaning service, the ease of walking into a house that someone else has tended, and began cleaning my own home and banking the money. The house may not be magazine ready at all times, but cleaning up after myself has been good: It forces me to confront the messes that I have made and to try to avoid them in the future. I have promised myself that every two years, we will use some of the money to travel, and I now push the vacuum cleaner and scrub the bathrooms while uttering a single word: Italy. Italy. ITALY!

I gave up boxing and heavy weights and grinding workouts, for my heart was no longer there and my body could not withstand the physical toil. Most mornings now, I dance, and if you want a picture of me, think of me smiling and twirling, feet tapping the ground, bobbed auburn hair flapping messily around my face.

And lately I have been giving up board memberships and causes, time commitments that I made a few years ago as I stood at the top of the proverbial hill and worried that it was all downhill from there. What do I do? I asked myself. One answer seemed to be that I devote myself to a world outside of my own. And for three or four years, that was satisfying, and now it is exhausting, and as I burn out, I realize that it is time to resign. Do I feel guilty? Sometimes. But I have felt equally guilty as I sit in those meetings, staring at the clock, muttering under my breath, all gladness gone. There is always someone there to fill the breach, and as Beyoncé wisely notes, Don’t ever get to thinking/that you’re irreplaceable.

At some point I realized that the likelihood of my having to cough up a resume was small, that there was no permanent record, that the only person genuinely judging how I spent my time was me, that no one would subject my home to a white glove test. Again, I needed an easier version of me. One who dances, takes art classes, works hard enough but not too hard. One who dreams of Italy while enveloped in the scent of Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day. One who routinely breathes a sigh of relief.

Lately, it all seems to come down to Buddy. Yesterday morning I took him to the veterinary surgeon, a man who recognized me from the gym, yet another moment that makes me realize just how small Savannah is.  I was both pleased and amused to find that a surgeon looks like a surgeon even if he operates on animals, not people: The doctor was compact and fastidious, meticulous hands practically glowing as they gestured elegantly. But what he said surprised me. Yes, Buddy has a small tumor in an inopportune place, a lesion that can be removed with clean margins. Yes, this type of tumor may metastasize in small spots throughout Buddy’s lymph nodes, but that has not happened yet.

What concerned the doctor more was how Buddy sat — as he always had, left leg extended like a showgirl. He felt Buddy’s ankles and hips and told me that it was obvious that Buddy had suffered some bone and joint condition as a puppy that left him with swollen joints and a fair amount of discomfort. It bothered him that the condition had never been diagnosed; there were simple, inexpensive things that he could do to improve Buddy’s day to day life. The surgeon’s attitude was this: Buddy’s cancer may get him, to be sure, but let’s give him greater mobility, greater freedom, less pain. Let’s focus on the small, simple details, and put aside the fears of an eventuality that may never happen and is far harder to control.

And there it was, friends. A reminder that perhaps I had been worrying about all the wrong things for all those years: the wants, the strivings, the giant fears in the night. That perhaps it was far simpler than that: focus on the needs, the little things that bring comfort and joy.

ALC