Repurposing

Like most women my age I am going through the transition of having my children go out on their own, sometimes far away from me. For those of us, and that would be most of us, who have the fleeting feeling sometimes that the best time of our lives was when we and our children were living together in a sunny and safe cocoon of simple routines, when we wonder if that was our best zone, and maybe it's gone, I think it is important to remember all the families we are part of in our lives.

After all if I had stayed totally enclosed in the family I had my own happy childhood in, I would have missed the family I started myself. And if I try to hold on to a certain version of my children now, I will miss my place in their new lives and new families. Sometimes the best of us has to be cut up and sewn in usefully as pieces in something else, like a new quilt, or like the buttons we cut off good old coats and save until we can use them again.

If a sewer can't understand making new things, who can?