Heat Lighting [Scaramouche | Reader]

23 - im scared, mom

Now it's been long enough to talk about it
I've started not to doubt it, just wrap my head around it
I remember when you told me it's an everyday decision
But with my double vision, how was I supposed to see the way?

—Gilded Lily-Cults—0:19—

—

I am scared of many things.

The emotion isn't unfamiliar to me, I've gotten used to it after a while. It is the first thing we experience when we try something new, after all. Perhaps the first time I remember feeling fear was when my mother taught me how to sew for the first time. Our family shop was renowned for its gorgeous needlework embroidery and people from far and wide would order clothing from us to show their status with the detailed patterning.

I recall how my heart was hammering through my chest when she sat me down in her lap and slowly showed me how to complete a running stitch; tie a knot at the end of the string, thread it through the eye of the needle, poke through the bottom of the fabric and pull the string all the way up, insert the needle back down through the top of the fabric a little ways away, then pull it back down till just tight enough. I was so nervous that when she handed me the needle my hands couldn't grasp it and it clattered lightly on the floor. She laughed with a lighthearted smile and picked up the shiny metal and held my hand in hers this time to teach me once more. She told me there was nothing to worry about, learning is all about the mistakes.

I was a child at the time, yet it feels that in some ways I am still the same now. When I got my vision, my mother was sitting in the shop at her workbench where a large order was waiting to be processed. I had been upstairs and was working on a kimono. The stitching swirled across the fabric in a flowing flower pattern, but it was stalled a foot from the bottom of the fabric; it had been stalled like that for weeks. I would get to a particularly hard stitch and struggle to complete it, mess it up, stab my finger trying to get it out and then have to retry. It wasn't like I didn't know how to complete the motions for the stitch, on the contrary, actually, I knew each and every stitch by heart. I had studied them all when my mom gave me a journal full of them to read. My fingers would just start to shake and that nervous feeling, the scared feeling, crawled up my spine and the needle would poke holes in the wrong places or simply fall the floor. I couldn't understand what the issue was; this kimono was particularly easy to make and wasn't a special order, so why was I so scared? My mom walked up to the living room and smiled as she brushed past me toward the bathroom. Her footsteps ceased, however, and I felt her lean behind me to see what I was doing.

"What's wrong?"

She asked speaking into my ear as she put her hands on my shoulders.

"I can't do it. I don't understand, it's not even that difficult, I just- I just-"

My nervous hands trembled with fear of disappointing my mother. In the back of my mind I probably had known that she would never be disappointed in me, not ever. But at that moment my thoughts were running into overdrive. The pain and frustration of poking myself over and over and never getting the stitch correct built up inside the jar of emotions in my chest; now it was full and all my bottled up feelings were ready to spill all over the floor. My head began to hurt as I felt tears prick the corners of my eyes, yet in my daze I felt my mother squeeze my shoulders and walk away.

"Keep at it. I'm sure you'll get it soon. It's the struggle that brings satisfaction to the product."

I knew that. I knew she was right. I agreed with her for heavens sake, so why was my body trying to curl in on itself? All I wanted to do was use needlework as an art form, yet I couldn't even finish this one simple stitch? There was no way I would be able to carry on the family legacy if I couldn't sew competently enough.