The Sewing Box

Would she love me? Would she resent me? Those were early on questions that would remain unanswered for now.

Ten years passed since I allowed those questions to enter in my mind, and if I'm honest with myself, they had the potential to pierce my self worth. Even though the answers to those questions were revealed subtly over the years, there was an unexpected gift about to be invisibly unwrapped that created the answer that rested my heart.

It's going to be her tenth Christmas with us. She's grown into a master crafter among other things, and has been busy crafting Christmas presents this year. She asked her Dad what he wanted for Christmas, and while dressed in his black and red Grumpy patterned pajama pants, predictably said "Nothing". Well, that was just enough inspiration to spark her imagination on nothing while I was a bit irritated with his answer.

Earlier in the week, she asked me if I liked quotes, and noticing she had several cut out on paper, I said "Yes", suspecting my Christmas present is going to involve quotes. Seeing several white crisp strips of paper on the desk, a few curled up like crimped Christmas ribbons, I admired her attention to detail in prepping my gift. She always had a knack for meticulously crafting, eating, and drawing with her hands. Even as a toddler, she could of claimed neatest eating toddler in any spaghetti eating contest should it have existed. Yet all I could do was compare her to her sister, four years older sitting at the dinner table, usually covered in sauce on her face, stains on her clothes, and hair clumped together with any jelly-like substance in her grabbable perimeter. In contrast, she sat in her high chair with her legs crossed, not a spot of spaghetti on her and her hair as neat as a China doll.

Now she's in fourth grade, and those neat and nifty ten fingers were crafting gifts and I was about to be the beneficiary of that niftiness. Yesterday, she was patiently sewing two pillow cases to give her god parents at our annual "Gotcha Day" dinner tonight. We had shopped together for material and watched a youtube video together to learn how to thread her sewing machine, but she made them all by herself without help from me because I never had the patience to sew. While she was sewing, I noticed a sewing box made of straw on the floor. One that had been stored away for the last 13 years. I asked her "Is that my mom's sewing box?!". It warmed my heart when she said yes, and I thought to myself "I miss my mom" - saying it out loud spontaneously as I was leaving the room. "Wait" she said. She went to her pile of quotes and read one out loud to me:

"The more you grow, the more you realize your mother is the best friend you'll ever have."

I mentioned to her that I remembered why I didn't like to sew; because threading the sewing machine was such a challenge for me. I hugged her, and told her that she and her sister were the only people in the world that I would help thread a sewing machine.

My quotes arrived gift wrapped on Christmas morning in a glass canning jar, complete with a gold screw off top that had a hand written message in purple marker on the lid - Reasons Why I Love You. Inside that jar were tens of curled up strips of paper with quotes on them. I keep the jar on my work desk, and when life has a tumble, I unroll a crimped quote and breathe a little sigh of relief that my questions have been answered. And Dad's gift - a canning jar with a lid on the top, a purple curly ribbon around the screw top, and his message was in purple on the side - A Jar Full of Nothing, with of course, nothing inside.