I'm thinking about my mother and her creativity.
Her father was an engineer with the gas company and her mother sewed clothes to dress three daughters during the Depression. My mother was a graduate of engineering school. In that post-war time, by choice or necessity, she became a math teacher. I think of her as making do, getting by and not making waves.
I wish I could touch the maternity suit she fashioned from a man's tailored suit.
As I look around my office studio, I think back to her sewing room. It was the space where a half bath was to go, off the master bedroom. But they never spent the money to finish it. It was big enough for a card table, rickety under the heavy Kenmore, and a folding chair. I was always afraid of stepping on a pin or picking up a splinter on the rough sub flooring. I don't think she even put down a throw rug.
Wonderful things came out of that room, but never quite designer masterpieces. They were pretty things, useful things.
So I wonder why she never picked up knitting from my grandmother. Is it because it is more public, that people would inquire what she was making? As a child of the Depression, did she not want people to think that she couldn't have store-bought? Or might it be that she couldn't fully concentrate while carrying it around?
Was she more comfortable creating in a small, hidden, unfinished room?
You may have something there.
ReplyDeleteMoM had few social needs. Perhaps being half of the P twins for her first 24 years fulfilled all need for socialization. And she wasn't one for requiring her environments to be just so. She was content making dresses and drapes in her cramped unfinished room where the light came in quite nicely from the west.