“couched” in mediocrity *

I’m handsewing more. It’s a learning experience. Learning that I suck at handsewing. Whatever. By this “whatever” I mean as follows: I think I am this incredibly bush-league person who gets decent enough at a variety of talents but ever gets very good at any particular thing.  This previous sentence is fact; the part that’s interesting is I struggle with accepting my fair-to-middling-ness.  I feel guilty that I never reach Awesome.  Yet it isn’t even that I’m unwilling or unable to put the time in to do something really well. It’s just that at a certain point I plateau and can’t / don’t push past it. This is Me; this is my life (Trust me – Cooking! Yoga! Blow jobs!). It kind of makes me feel terrible and it kind of makes me laugh.

I am working on being grateful for a body that works and for a life where I can exercise my creativity and impulsivity.  These are wonderful forces in my life.

Today I made a sweet-enough little wrist pincushion (recognize the fabric for the applique’d patch?). For stitchers these devices are quite useful (you keep needles and pins handy instead of buried under piles of fabric alongside your work station or wherever else). I’d love to gift this to someone; I am not sure who though. I sized it to fit my rather small wrist (6 1/2″) and slip over my, shall we say, petite (= stubby) hands.

I like up-close pictures of stitching work because the way these pictures look is how I feel when I am sewing and things are going well:

(You can see more delicious up-close photos of this project here at the Flickr tagset.)

My daughter is having intermittent bouts of difficulty. She has grown to be a very good citizen who is also at times very hard on herself.  I seem to be a source of her power and a source of her self-hatred.  She is alternatively child-like and affectionate to me, then suddenly deeply troubled and wounded.  Her hurt surfaces even at times when I have done nothing, in that moment, to hurt her. Nevertheless I know this is my fault because I have not been a gentle parent. I try to wait patiently for her. I try to do better as a parent. It is hard.

I seek to surround myself with humane parents.  Because I look around me and see so many who act as if their children are these huge impositions in their life.  The kids are messy or “rude” or they crawl into bed at night and they Need To Learn Limits. Etc. Etc. I see so many non-parents act as if children are obtuse, messy, smelly, clumsy, “rude”, scary, sub-human, second-class citizens.  It is a grave disservice we do to our children.  They are people first and foremost.  So many of us are too tiny, pent-up, and fearful to do better by them.

These days my sins are not those of a person who does not recognize the Sacred within my children (and all other people), but rather a person who has a hard time just slowing down to Be. This is the gift my daughter needs. I hope I can give it to her the next time she feels open to requiring me.

* Because that blue/gold bit on the pincushion is a couched stitch! Hahahaha… ha… heh. Eh. Meh.