Illustration by Victoria Borges
“I am not a maker.”
This is my mantra. I wail it at my family after serving up plates of bubbling brown waste instead of the quinoa burgers I promised.
I mutter it under my breath as I try to draw Spider-Man under the watchful eye of a 3-year-old, who shrieks in contempt when I add too much blue to the arms.
I think it in my head as I read through descriptions of art classes and decide to stay home and watch a show about murder instead.
I do not enjoy the crafts. It took me a while to accept this fact about myself, and longer to stop pretending it wasn’t so. And in the interim, people suffered.
Like the Christmas I gifted homemade spaghetti sauce to family members and skipped the appropriate canning procedures — basically handing everyone a jar of tomatoes and deadly bacteria.
I don’t have the patience and attention to detail that “making” demands. This doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate it, because I do. I happily eat people’s homemade cakes and purchase their art to display around my house, which smells of burnt quinoa.
Still, there is a voice in my head that tells me I am a jerk for not carving that watermelon into a dinosaur like Pinterest told me to, or trying to shirk my Easter egg-dyeing responsibilities.
I know it’s wrong to stuff my children into store-bought Halloween costumes instead of hand-stitching them out of … pillowcases … and er, pantyhose? (I don’t know — I’m not a maker, dammit!)
I wasn’t raised to be this awful. My mother sewed our Halloween costumes every year. She baked cookies, helped with our science fair projects and read to us at night — books like “Jamaica Inn,” which is a story about an albino vicar who shipwrecks, plunders and kills along the coast of Cornwall. We would go to bed with bellies full of molasses cookies and minds full of wicked white priests.
And it was wonderful. Unfortunately, I walked away from my childhood with none of my mother’s craft abilities — only an enduring love for tales of murder.
I feel sad when I see that my friends were making kombucha and yogurt while I was lying facedown on a bed as my sons wrestled on top of me, hoping the experience would somehow approximate a massage. The makers end up with something amazing for their efforts, and I end up with someone kicking me in the privates.
I told myself that if I could pick one thing to master, then it wouldn’t be so bad. “I can be the mom who makes the best chocolate chip cookies,” I decided one day, then baked one mediocre batch and threw in the towel. “I can be the mom who buys the best chocolate chip cookies,” I thought, as I settled in to watch “Making a Murderer.”
I think the pressure I feel to be a craftier person is partly outdated gender expectations, partly my own insecurity, but mostly a real, deep-seated longing to make sure my kids experience the very specific kind of love that lives in personal gestures — drawing with them, reading to them, baking for them. The stuff my mom did with me that I cherish.
My sons don’t notice that my cookies are dense little nuggets of disappointment, or that my Spider-Man looks like a member of Blue Man Group (kidding — they totally notice that).
It’s less about the outcome, less about my own enjoyment and more about making the effort. I’ll never love crafting, but I’m gonna keep hacking away at it for the sake of my kids, cutting as many corners as I can in the process.
So, next Halloween, our sons might be dressed in pillowcases and pantyhose. Or they may be home sick with botulism from my spaghetti. But by God, they will know the ham-fisted touch of a mother who loves them enough to make a half-assed effort.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
When she’s not writing about herself in the third person, you can find Kate Bredimus writing about more interesting things as senior copywriter for Elevation Advertising. She also documents her adventures as mom to 3-year-old triplets at Trips-Ahoy.com.
