Sewing project

Last week Wife embarked on a sewing project. Her grand vision was to “shop for Christmas in the garage” by making clothes for everyone, thus using up some of the boxes and boxes of fabric we have in the garage and not spending money (of which she feels chronically short). In the end it hasn’t worked out quite that way. Her very first piece, a vest for Son 1, took her a week instead of a day – a very, very frustrating week – and cost her $150 in a service call to repair her sewing machine midway through. During this week she has been progressively more panicked as she sees time slipping through her fingers, and she has berated her own mistakes mercilessly: “I’ve known better than to make that mistake since I was six!”

When he hasn’t had homework from school, Son 2 has been helping her ever more deeply. First he was just unpacking boxes of fabric from the garage, or holding one end of the measuring tape; but after a couple of days he was helping her read the pattern and making suggestions what it probably meant. (Apparently his suggestions were right, for what it is worth.) I began to get a bit disgruntled at this, because I remember so many years when Wife would set herself some big project that was simply outside her grasp and I would have to step in and do a lot of it for her. (None of these were sewing projects, at which I would be nearly useless, but still.) But I didn’t say anything until he actually told her, “Mom, I wish I knew how to sew and then I could do this all for you! Maybe you can teach me.” I truly love how much compassion Son 2 has for others, but this went so far it disturbed me.

I talked to him privately just for a moment, to say that even if he did know how to sew I feared it wouldn’t make Wife happier; that in the past when I stepped in to help her with a project she just planned her next project even bigger, to take account of the help she knew she would get from me. Son 2 was distinctly unimpressed, and growled, “So you’d just let her suffer?” Ooops. Fail.

I had a little better luck, surprisingly, talking to Wife after Son 2 had gone to bed. I started by reminding her, “You remember back when we were first married, how you would talk about the things that were bugging you and I would always try to fix them? And finally you had to tell me to lay off, because sometimes you just needed to vent and weren’t asking me to interfere?”

“Yes.”

“Well that’s what Son 2 is doing right now. The reason he is being so helpful is that he hears how unhappy you are with the way your project is going, and he’s trying to fix it for you so you’ll be happier.”

“I really appreciate that he is helping me so much. He doesn’t have to.”

“I think he thinks he does.”

“I’ve even told him to go do something else for a while, because it’s my project and I should handle it. But it just seems like he really needs to help people. And I think that’s good.”

“It is good, but that’s not what he needs.”

“What, then?”

“What he really needs is for you to be happy. He has tried to look after you ever since he was three, when you were so sick. And every time you complain about the project or insult yourself for your mistakes, he hears it as a call to arms, to come to your rescue. All he really needs is for you to be happy … or at least, if you are disappointed in how the project is going, not to grouse about it out loud.”

She said she’d think about it.

I was pretty depressed for the next day or so at Son 2’s disappointment in me. Clearly I shouldn’t have said anything, but I also didn’t – don’t – want him to get sucked into the trap of spending the rest of his life rescuing Wife. But then I realized maybe I should just relax over the whole issue and trust him to figure this out by himself. In the evenings this week I have been reading him C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, and there was a passage in the chapter we read last night that directly addresses this whole topic:

“Quick,” she said. “There is still time. Stop it. Stop it at once.”

“Stop what?”

“Using pity, other people’s pity, in the wrong way…. Pity was meant to be a spur that drives joy to help misery. But it can be used the wrong way round. It can be used for a ind of blackmailing. Those who choose misery can hold joy up to ransom, by pity…. Even as a child you did it. Instead of saying you were sorry, you went and sulked in the attic … because you knew that sooner or later one of your sisters would say, ‘I can’t bear to think of him sitting up there alone, crying.’ You used their pity to blackmail them, and they gave in in the end….”

The details are different, but Son 2 is a bright kid.