This is coming along. Thanks to those who labor to grow and pick coffee beans, thus enabling me to have marathon work sessions, the sky and the sides of the plastic ice cubes are roughly stitched. However, I’ve decided that I’m not leaving the house anymore except to walk the dogs or go to the gym.

Yesterday I headed to the fabric store to pick up thread to match the bear. The following exchange took place (please tune out if you’ve already read this on F-book).

Clerk: “Are you doing some embroidery?”

Me: “No. I’m working on a quilt.” (Note to self: MISTAKE!!! Never tell people in fabric stores the truth! Nothing good ever comes of it.)

Clerk: “This is embroidery thread. It isn’t quilting thread.”

Me: “Yep. That’s what I use.”

Clerk: “The embroidery thread is more expensive than quilting thread.”

Me: “Yes, but it’s what I use.”

Clerk: “I just want to be sure, because most people use quilting thread.”

Me: “Yes, well, the embroidery thread works great when I’m thread painting or stitching densely.” (May I please just pay and leave?)

Clerk, still not quite believing me: “So what are you quilting.”

Me: “Something depressing.” (Still hoping she’ll ring me up and I can leave.)

Clerk: “Yes? What is it?”

Me: “It concerns global warming. It features a drowning polar bear.” (Just kidding. It’s a bunch of Sunbonnet Sues humping drunk frat boys who have STDs. Please may I leave?)

Clerk, pretending to be perky: “Oh, more people should make quilts with drowning polar bears! Will you, you know, put it on your bed?”

Me: “No. It will go to shows. Galleries. And so forth.” (%$#@#, I’ve tried to be polite, and there’s now a line about a mile long. Here – see this magazine? My stuff is in it. I know what kind of thread I want. Can I please. Just. Pay and leave? Or would you maybe like to see my passport and credit report while I’m here? Maybe get a sample of my DNA?)

The gatekeeper of hell finally, reluctantly rang up the thread and decided that I could go.

I have a little sympathy for the clerk, a tiny amount. I’m sure the people at fabric stores end up doing quite a bit of “tech support” with novices wandering in and not knowing quite what they need. In fairness, if I was working on a utility quilt rather than a piece of artwork, I would indeed make different thread choices. However, I’ve experimented to find what works for me, and after the second round of “this is what I use”, she should have desisted. The thing about my putting a rendering of a drowning polar bear on my bed was over the top; probably I should have just left at that point.

Well, she was right about one thing: the thread was overpriced. The convenience of being able to drive a mile or two to the Chain Fabric Store Which Shall Not Be Named versus ordering thread online and waiting turned out to not be worth it, especially once she singlehandedly removed the convenience.

No, it’s time to do what I’ve been threatening to do for ages. I need to sit down and inventory my thread collection, then order every color I’m missing from Allstitch. All of them. I don’t care if it takes months of budgeting and multiple orders. I don’t care if there are drawers and drawers of thread left when I die, thread which has to be given away to the home for pregnant teenage iguanas. I never want to go back to that fabric store for thread or, really, anything at all.

Check this out. This is what I purchased yesterday, eight spools of 250 yards each, $36.92 before taxes. That comes to 2000 yards for $36.92.

Here, by contrast, are some of Allstitch’s offerings, fourteen spools of 1100 yards each, at $2.63 each. That’s 15,400 yards – 7.7 times as much thread as from the Chain Store from Hell – for $36.82, ten cents less. Buy $150 worth and they’ll throw in free shipping.

Need some needles? Sure we do. I change needles and dust out and lightly lube the machine after every 4-5 bobbins, so I go through lots of needles. The good news is, Allstitch will sell me bulk needles at around $12/100, or about 12 cents per needle. The Chain Store from Hell wants $4.29 for a four-pack of needles, making them run over a dollar per needle. At that price, one would need to come up with a needle-sharpening jig and reuse them!

You know what else is great about Allstitch? They let me buy stuff without giving me the third degree. In all the years I’ve been buying supplies from them, there’s only been one goof, which they promptly rectified. Otherwise I simply order stuff online, perhaps while sitting in my pajamas and sipping coffee, and a week later it appears, as though by magic. Unlike some vendors, they don’t constantly dun me with advertising emails or otherwise bother me. I give them money. They give me stuff. It’s wonderful.

Suck it, Chain Store from Hell. I’d suggest that you rot in hell, except you’ve already attained that state.

There’s the card I’m sending out this year; click if you wish to see a larger version. I confess that I used the design as a prototype for a quilt I may make. Of course, it was totally horrid and torturous having to buy (and later consume) candy for “research” purposes. And yes, that’s my weiner-basset up there driving the sleigh pulled by squirrels.

Jezebel has a “best/worst Christmas gift ever” article. It’s funny in a wincing “Oh lord; that could have been me cluelessly giving someone that shell-filled Mason jar atop a candlestick” way. Yes, it’s true. I see myself on the “inflicting” side of the gift-giving process. My husband very politely refuses to believe that I’ve ever been an awful gift-giver – or at least, he pretends to believe that, bless him. But it’s true. Here’s a partial list of the bad gifts I’ve given over the years, at least the ones I can remember. Heaven only knows what else I’ve done that’s lost to the winds of time. Prepare to wince.

To my brother:

• The same book on motorcycles (or was it guitars?), two years in a row. Never mind how I managed that – it takes a special type of genius. To his credit, he was gracious about it and just sort of didn’t mention it to me. It’s probably good that I saw the twin books on his shelf, though, or he might have received the same book a third year.
• A hand-painted T-shirt featuring him as one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which might not have been so bad if the tail I rendered hadn’t resembled a penis. I understand that this was a source of great merriment and humiliation when he wore it to school.

To my sister:

• A cosmetics organizer she’d asked for, only I sent it in January or February.
• The first quilt I ever made, which was admittedly of poor quality. On a later visit, I found it out in the mud and feces-caked front yard with the dogs. That’s how good it was.

To my stepmother:

• Everything I ever gave her, as detailed in a manifesto of gifts she wished to not receive from me. In her defense, the list included cookware. Yes, I have been guilty of giving a mother-figure cookware, because that’s what all women naturally want, to be classified in terms of domestic tasks that they don’t even enjoy.

A lace snowflake. If you get on my Christmas list and you aren’t careful, you may receive one.

To various relatives:

• A variety of awful T-shirts and sweatshirts which I made, including a black sweatshirt festooned with sparkly fall leaves. The latter might not have been so bad for someone in her forties, but was a bad call for my teenaged niece-by-marriage. Plus it was a couple of sizes too small. Bless the girl for restraining herself to a small glare. I hope that wherever she is now, she receives major karma points for graciousness in the face of disappointment.
• Homemade fruitcake. “It made the entire package reek of alcohol,” my stepmother complained.
• Christmas ornaments which I had painted. “You father hates Santa Claus,” my stepmother informed me after the fact. Also: “They were so heavy that they fell off the tree.” I’m sure they broke as well, perhaps even by accident.
• Lace snowflake ornaments made on my embroidery machine. Only one person expressed enthusiasm over these snowflakes. I assume the rest were objects of puzzlement.

Hand-painted ornaments, of the type I used to make and give out. Some folks like receiving these – and by “some folks”, I mean no one that I know.

To my husband:

• Silk boxer shorts and a T-shirt featuring a Krispy Kreme doughnut rendered as a delivery boy. My husband isn’t a lounging sort of fellow, nor does he have a particular fondness for Krispy Kreme doughnuts. I’ve since liberated the T-shirt from his drawer and wear it for workouts. Probably I should do the same with the boxer shorts.

To my son:

• Various books on topics he could care less about, such as whittling wood and making shadow puppets.

To my mother:

• Books which I self-righteously thought she should read, knick-knacks she had no need or room for, and a down-filled throw. The latter might not have been so bad if she wasn’t allergic to feathers.

To my step-great-great aunt, who was failing with dementia:

• A malachite worry stone. “She dropped it and it broke,” my stepmother sniffed when I asked if the gift had been enjoyed. (These days my default gift to people who are dying or who have dementia is an album of photos. I figure if nothing else, they can look at the colorful photos and wonder who the people are.)

For these sins, I apologize. There was a decade or so there where I was batting a thousand with the homemade and otherwise “thoughtful” gifts. Hopefully I’ve upped my game a bit since then, though. My gift-giving list is mostly pared down to my husband and son, plus the one person who made the mistake of enthusing over the lace snowflakes. (Unless she says otherwise, she will receive a relentless barrage of lace snowflakes in her Christmas card for the next twenty years.) These days I stick to lists which people have given me, maybe send a treat hamper off to my in-laws and a donation to the food bank, and that’s it. If one can’t be clever and thoughtful, being non-clever and thoughtful is the next best thing. Give people joy if you can, play with the family dog, and bake cookies.

Awesome Cthulu ornament from my brother-in-law

Have I also received odd gifts or had occasions used as emotional weapons? Sure. Mostly, though, I’ve been treated with great kindness. There’s the brother-in-law who sent me the molecular gastronomy kit and the Cthulu ornament, both of which I dearly love. There’s the father-in-law who painstakingly picked out quilting fabric to ship me, and the mother-in-law who would faithfully send me the latest Maeve Binchy novel, back when Binchy was alive. One sister-in-law bakes and ships Christmas cookies each year, and the other sister-in-law sends some munchie she knows we’ll enjoy. They’re all good people, which I guess isn’t surprising considering that they’re related to my husband.

There are also my stepmother’s relatives. For all that she and I have a poisoned relationship, her relatives were some of the warmest people I’ve ever known. Her sister, a lovely young woman, would take me horseback riding. Her brother, who wasn’t financially affluent, would nevertheless give me an exquisite bottle of perfume for Christmas. Her parents did whatever they could to make a ragged nine-year-old child feel welcome, including picking out a special Star Trek Spock doll or making one of those grotesque/wonderful birthday cakes which features a Barbie doll impaled in a half-sphere of frosted cake-skirt.

Crafting books, a gift from my step-grandmother many years ago

Even though she’s now deceased, I frequently have reason to offer thanks to my step-grandmother. Because of her, I was supplied with books and supplies for knitting, jewelry-making, and denim decorating, and worlds opened. It’s because of her that I’ve had the guts to pursue my own creative vision. I can’t count the number of times she provided me with a thoughtful kit of some type or other, replete with sewing supplies or nail polish or little girl jewelry. I still jab my needles in a tomato/strawberry pincushion which appeared under the tree one year and, although it perhaps isn’t as dignified, our dog eats from the remains of a gigantic Estee Lauder makeup palette/tray. I wish I had better expressed my gratitude to both her and my step-grandfather before they passed away.

A beloved pincushion, a reminder of kindness

Maybe that’s the way it goes sometimes, though. If we’re lucky, we get the consciousness and decency to properly thank people while they’re still around. Otherwise, maybe kindness is a pay-it-forward sort of thing, and many of us end up giving thanks for past kindnesses by taking a turn at giving ourselves. In my case, though, it appears that I should confine myself more to the toy and canned food drive end of things and take a pass on the handcrafted shirts and mason jar candlesticks!

Happy holidays – and I do mean that in an all-inclusive way, including holidays which aren’t part of my tradition but which matter to others – to all.

I feel for Sabrina Allen, the young lady from Texas who was kidnapped by her mother twelve years ago. I hope life will smooth out for her. I hope that both she and her father will find inner peace.

These cases rattle me a bit. I always feel a surge of sorrow for the kid. I also empathize with the parent searching for the lost child, now that I have my own child and can relate to that fear.

My own experience lasted maybe a couple of months. Not so bad compared to what Sabrina Allen and many others go through. Even a mild case leaves scars, though. Imagine what she is going through. The confusion. The pain. The anger.

In my case there were two incidents, the first occurring when my mother left my father when I was seven or eight. An outsider might conclude that leaving was long overdue, coming on the heels of years of psychosis, brutal anger, and violence. There must have been many good, loving moments in my early childhood, but I mostly don’t remember them. What I do remember is huddling under the covers in my bedroom, listening to shouts and bangs and the thud of fist against flesh, and praying fervently for God to make it stop. He didn’t. Coming home from school and finding my mother’s self-aborted fetus in the refrigerator. Her trying to jump out of a moving car while I pressed on her door lock for all I was worth. Marital strife which would conclude with her walking down to the graveyard, lying down with the dead, and my father wearily trying to get her to come home. Police called to a hotel room. Fights and fights and fights. Coming home from school to find her gone, taken away to the state hospital for a ninety day involuntary commitment.

That last incident must have awakened a certain degree of cunning. My mother was not stupid; she was “merely” profoundly mentally ill. She had – has – the type of illness which makes people deeply suspicious of those who tell them that they’re ill, and she was determined to never be institutionalized again. I suppose she must have been careful the day we dropped my father off at the university where he was taking classes. Certainly I suspected nothing. Smiles, kiss goodbye, I’ll pick you up later. That kind of thing. He blithely went off to class. We began the long drive to the next state.

“We’re going to see grandma and grandpa,” she told me. I was just barely bright enough to see that this didn’t jibe with our picking Dad up after school. Shouldn’t he be coming with us? “Oh, he’ll be up later,” my mother lied. Or perhaps it wasn’t a lie; perhaps she knew that he would indeed be up later, just not with her cooperation. This effectively stranded my father at a university in a rural area not exactly teeming with transportation options.

We drove and drove to one of her parents’ houses, which was approximately in the middle of nowhere on a mountain in Oklahoma. Godforsaken. No plumbing, no electricity, foul outhouse by the side of a barn, that kind of thing. It was the sort of place one expects to see naked children chasing chickens in the dirt. Seeing one snake devour another out by the outhouse qualified as riveting entertainment.

I was playing in the dirt when my father pulled up in a rental car a few days later. I was over the moon, but I didn’t get to hug him or really say hello. My grandfather promptly came out with a rifle, pointed it at him, and told him to get off the property. I hated him for that. I was afraid he was going to kill my father. It was terrifying.

I didn’t see my father again until after his visitation rights had been worked out. I have no idea how long that took, whether it was weeks or months. (This is the type of thing I think of when NSA surveillance of citizens comes up. There are some holes in my personal history that I would appreciate having cleared up.)

After that, although my entire world had been ripped apart, there was at least a routine. My mother’s parents had another house, a tiny frame affair in a suburb of Dallas. I was enrolled in school there and got to see my father every other weekend. On Saturday mornings I’d have my overnight bag packed early and be wiggling impatiently by the door, waiting for his car to pull up. It was a routine. Not a smooth life, what with my mother’s work and dating travails – there was always someone out to kill her, it seemed, or she’d grow paranoid about something else and I’d have to calm her down – but it was at least predictable. School, new friends, seeing my father a couple of times a month. Then my mother decided to shake it up.

I don’t know what brought it on. Maybe nothing at all, given the peculiar machinations of her mind. Or perhaps she was weary of the constraints of the custody agreement and my obvious eagerness to be with my father, or she’d had a blowup with her parents over her dating life.

It was a Friday morning during the spring, perhaps before Easter or spring break. I was excited about the weekend coming up; my father was picking me up the next day. When my mother shook me awake, though, instead of telling me to get ready for school, she told me to hurry up and get in the car. There was no time to get dressed; I was bundled away in the old hand-me-down dress I wore as a nightgown. I don’t think I was even wearing underwear, embarrassing as that memory is.

I protested. Wasn’t I supposed to go to school? Wasn’t Dad going to pick me up the next day? “You’re never going to see your father again,” she responded harshly. It was like a punch to the gut. I was bereft. I cried and whined to the point that if she hadn’t already been insane, she would have been driven there. She didn’t give a damn.

We drove and drove and drove. We went west through El Paso, then into New Mexico and Arizona. As we drove, I reflected that at least I could send my father a postcard. After the Oklahoma incident, he’d tucked some self-addressed, stamped postcards in a pocket in my overnight bag. “If she ever takes you off again,” he’d instructed me, “just put one of these in a mailbox so that I’ll know you’re alright.”

However, in the haste to get on the road – or perhaps because of one of my mother’s machinations – my overnight bag hadn’t made it into the car. I had ample opportunity to torture myself with that fact during the drive and during the coming weeks. If only, if only, if only I hadn’t messed up. If only I’d managed to grab the bag or the postcards. But I hadn’t, and I’d messed up good, and I was never going to get to see my father again. My mother was bitterly happy about the latter.

I don’t think she had a plan beyond getting in the car and driving. I think she very rapidly ran out of money. There was a man or men. In one town we stayed with a stranger for several days. I dwelled on his couch in front of the TV. My mother would disappear into the man’s bedroom at night, telling me “Don’t tell him I’m wearing my nightgown. He thinks these are my normal clothes.” A desperate lie told by a mother whoring herself out and wanting to hide that fact from her young daughter.

Then came the inevitable dawn awakening, the dramatic rush to the car. “We’ve got to get out of here! He said I need to be in a mental hospital,” she hissed, “He’s going to have me committed!” I’ve since concluded that this might have been a very tidy way for the man to get us, a couple of moochers, to move on. It worked.

So much of that time is a blur. Was there one new school or two or three? There is no one to ask. I remember fingernail inspections, square dancing, and a handkerchief requirement at one school. I also remember vomiting, not wanting to eat, and begging for my father.

Eventually we landed at her sister’s trailer house in Arizona. There was an uncle by marriage, a kind man who had dark hair like my father. He saw me admiring his slide rule, which was like the slide rule my father had given me, a device I used for cheating during multiplication tests. I felt incredibly homesick. My uncle gave me the slide rule. It was a sympathetic gesture during an especially low point in my life, and I hope that he’s been repaid in kind.

I don’t know how it all came to an end. I dimly remember mutterings about a phone call from my mother’s parents and there being a warrant. I can still see my mother glaring at me in brittle anger, biting out “The child wants to see its father.”

I did get to see my father again, thankfully, and was living with him and his new wife by the summer after the fourth grade. It wasn’t a formal arrangement at first, just my going to visit for the summer and never quite going back to my mother. Eventually she granted him custody. There was certainly an element of convenience for her, but I also think that, despite being mentally ill, she was trying to do the right thing. She did love me. In the rational part of her brain, she knew I wanted to be with my father, knew that he could give me access to opportunities that she couldn’t. Or perhaps, as my stepmother liked to put it, she was simply “irresponsible and didn’t want to have to take care of me.” Either way, it cost her dearly.

There wasn’t a happy ending, despite everyone pretending that there was. I wonder if there ever is. My mother frequently expressed fears that they would “turn (me) against (her)”. Although paranoid and inclined to say such things anyhow, she was not incorrect. I did adore my father and it was clear that my best option for a stable life was living with him and my stepmother. The devil’s bargain, which was unvoiced but rapidly became clear, was that to gain their approval, I would have to hide any sign that I loved my mother or wanted to see her. I did this. I turned my back on my mother. It hurt and I felt traitorous, but I did it. I fully bought into the tacit and damaging “your mother is dirt and your stepmother is your new mother” game.

My father did his level best to minimize my contact with her. I think he was partly motivated by a very real knowledge of her capacity to wreak havoc, but he was also extremely angry and, I believe, vengeful. She did not know our address or phone number, and could contact me only via a mailbox in another town. When I received mail from her, they would read it or have nasty comments like “What crazy thing is she up to now?” From time to time my father would get an evil smile and say things like “I’m not saying that you never have to see her again after you turn 18, but if you choose not to, there’s nothing anyone can do about it.”

On one occasion, when I hadn’t seen her for months, a visitation was arranged. The drop off point was a motel. She was perhaps five minutes late. My father chose to interpret that as her not having shown up, and gleefully sped off. In the rearview mirror I could see her pulling up. It hurt. I had wanted to see her, but felt I had to pretend that I didn’t. I was torn.

When I did see her, there would be an interrogation afterwards, mostly from my stepmother. There were nasty derisive comments about what we’d done. I wasn’t smart enough to avoid or deflect them. “When you’ve been to see your mother, I can smell her on you,” my stepmother once said, her nose wrinkling, “I can smell her personal odor on you.” Suddenly something which should have been nice, going to see my mother, became dirty and shameful.

Life goes on. At some point years down the road, I suppose one gains compassion for everyone involved: the profoundly mentally ill young woman who wasn’t capable of managing her own thoughts, much less marriage or being a mother; the man who tried to live up to his responsibilities as a parent but didn’t throttle back his rage and bitterness; the woman who married into a dysfunctional situation, was thrust into far too much responsibility, and came to hate her stepdaughter.

One gains compassion, but one also loses trust. One learns that the people one should be able to depend on most in the world can’t be trusted to put aside their anger and do the right thing for a child. Or perhaps they will do the right thing, but only to a point. “Honor thy father and thy mother – at least, until it becomes inconvenient for the custodial parent.” As the years go by and one silently observes the unchanging behavior of the main players, sees their treatment trickle down to one’s own child, the distrust solidifies into a wall. Perhaps one is damaged in other ways as well. The kind of anger which leads to kidnappings and using one’s child as a pawn is corrosive for everyone involved.

Think a kind thought for Sabrina Allen. Whatever the specifics of her own story, that which she thought was true has become a lie. Her life has been turned upside down.

Her father, for his part, has had one form of agony and uncertainty removed, and is now embarking on the difficult journey of trying to build a relationship with a daughter who regards him as a stranger.

May they both find peace.