A few things have changed since I became a parent. One of those things is my approach to being patient. Patience can mean a lot of things: the ability to wait for something you want (or want to happen), the ability to tolerate delays, the ability to abide in discomfort until it has passed, among others. For me this feels very related to resilience, or the ability to recover from challenges. If you are able to remain patient, you may also find that the difficulties don’t feel as difficult as they could have.
What the fuck am I rambling on about?
I was reflecting on this while I was sewing a dress this week. I used to be a person who could get lost in my sewing room for hours at a time (figuratively, although with the amount of fabric there is in there, sometimes literally too). I would often binge-sew the way others would binge-watch TV. It wasn’t unusual for me to spend a solid 4 hour chunk of time in my sewing room, working away on a project. But, this often resulted in almost a frenzied approach to sewing, where I could just squeak out a project in a day if I worked fast.
Shockingly, this resulted in some projects that were not as tidy or as intentional as they could have been. The rush to finish gave way to taking shortcuts and sometimes the end result was not something I was entirely proud of.
So what’s changed? Obviously, I birthed an entire child, which turned my world upside down (in some of the worst and best ways). But with this came a new set of obligations, and a difference in how busy my days are. My sewing time has become shorter and less available, and I was not excited about this change. How would I ever finish a project if I couldn’t just power through to the end?
Well, it turns out that projects can turn out beautifully when they are approached in smaller chunks of time. I may only have 30 or 45 minutes to sew, depending on when my son wakes up, so what can I do in this amount of time? I’ve had to learn to be satisfied with completing a step of a project, and had to learn to cope with what happens when I need to unpick a seam or otherwise make a change to something that has already been sewn, which feels especially challenging when I have to leave it for the next time I have an opportunity.
The unexpected result is that I have slowed down with my sewing, the same way I have to slow down with my child. I finished a dress this week that made me work for the reward – I had to try one step 3 times to get the length right, and re-do the side seams to let out a little more fabric. The result was worth it, but I don’t know if I would have gotten there with the Pre-mom Kate approach. It’s small changes like this that make me grateful each day for this change of pace in my life, even though time feels as though it flies.
