Embarrassing Embroideries

This appalling piece of work looks like it was made by a drunk person, doesn't it? Note the wobbly lines, the unfinished rows, the uneven spacing, the stains, the pathetic attempt at drawn-thread work. I was not drunk when I made it, but I was twelve years old, and utterly indifferent to the womanly art of embroidery.

Needle arts class was the bane of my school years. My first teachers, an order of German nuns in Barcelona, attempted to teach me crochet when I was six. "Watch me, Eulalinchen" the kindly Schwester would say, leaning close, yarn and hook in hand. But I was too overwhelmed by the proximity of her black veil and her starched white wimple and her fingers twisting the yarn and thrusting the hook into undefined loops to master anything beyond the chain stitch.

In second grade, we were taught to knit. Once again the Schwester showed me how to stick the big needles (this time two of them!) into what looked to me like random spaces. At home, my mother did some supplementary tutoring and even made a row or two for me, but by the end of the school year all I had to show for my efforts was a blue "scarf," barely longer than it was wide, with an enormous gap in the middle.

Just before the start of the summer vacation, the nuns would invite the parents to the annual needlework show. Crocheted doilies and knitted scarves, and the sophisticated embroideries of the older girls were pinned in decorative patters to the classroom walls. I still remember walking into that room with my parents, not wanting to look up because I knew that my scarf with its hole was too disgraceful to be exhibited.

But then, "Look! There it is!" my mother exclaimed. My scarf was on  the wall, among the more accomplished efforts of my agile-fingered classmates. And, miracle of miracles, you could not see the hole! The clever Schwester had pinned all four corners of the scarf to the wall, and scrunched up the middle, where the hole was, with a bright red ribbon.

In Ecuador, where I attended a school run by nuns imported from Spain, there was even more emphasis on needlework. That is where, with sweat and tears and gritted teeth, I produced the sampler shown above. Fortunately my mother, who had spent years of her life embroidering linens and baby clothes and my head-to-toe First Communion veil, overcame her upbringing and her culture and did not give my poor performance with needle and thread any importance. She had greater heights in mind for me to scale.

Although my mother's casual attitude helped, needlework class was an endless trial. But all those years of struggle paid off when, at fourteen, I moved to Birmingham, Alabama, and entered a high school run by Benedictine nuns. As Americans, these nuns were more practical-minded than my previous teachers and, in Home Ec, instead of cutwork and crewel, we were taught to make a skirt.

After some trouble learning how to thread the sewing machine (I knew very little English and couldn't understand the instructions) I came into my glory when it was time to finish the seams and hem the bottom of the skirt, which we did by hand. Most of the girls had never held a needle or worn a thimble, whereas I had had years of experience. Catch stitch, slip stitch, even blanket stitch held no secrets from me. The Schwester in Barcelona, and the hermana in Quito would have been pleased to see Sister Dorothy hold up, for the class's admiration, the flawless hem of my blue wool skirt.

Much later, my attitude towards needle and thread changed. In the 70s I joined the rest of my generation and crocheted afghans and ponchos out of granny squares. I made dresses for myself and my daughters, and even embroidered a Jacobean bell pull to summon nonexistent servants. 

The brain is a thrifty organ, and nothing that life throws its way is ever lost. My early needlework traumas probably  improved my eye-hand coordination. But they also taught me patience, humility, and frustration tolerance--life skills that have proven far more useful than the ability to produce flawless satin stitches or French knots.

(In this video, Renate Hiller makes an eloquent case for the teaching of handwork to children, and for the benefits that it offers to people of all ages.)

Nuns, Absolved

Get into conversation with a lapsed Catholic like me, and before long we're rolling up our psychological sleeves and showing off our scars, the result of wounds inflicted by nuns.  They scared us half to death, those nuns, we complain.  They killed our joie de vivre and injected guilt into our young souls.  We spent our childhood trembling in the shadow of their long habits.

I have, over the years, done my share of scar-showing and nun-blaming.  But now that I haven't been around veils and wimples for more than half a century, I'm having second thoughts about the nuns who taught me.

By the time I was eighteen, I had experienced nuns of three different orders and nationalities, in three different countries.  My first nuns, in Barcelona, came from Munich, having fled nazism in 1939 only to land in fascist Spain.  The school I attended in Ecuador was run by Mercedarian nuns from Spain.  And my high school teachers were Benedictine nuns in Birmingham, Alabama.

The German nuns were the scariest.  This may have been because their Spanish was sketchy.  When they got angry they lapsed into German, and nothing's more frightening  than being yelled at in a foreign language for failing to follow an order that you didn't understand in the first place. 

The Mercedarians were the most elegant.  They wore habits of creamy wool with contrasting black veils and belts.  But their thick-heeled, lace-up shoes looked mannish, I thought, and spoiled the effect.

By contrast with the German nuns, the American Benedictines were a piece of cake. They made jokes in class and actually praised us for just doing our homework, something the Germans wouldn't have dreamed of doing.  But by then fearing nuns was part of my nature, and I continued to tremble until I left Catholic education and went to college.

Why did so many of us spend our childhood afraid nuns?  Was it because we couldn't see their hair, ears or legs, or because they were so boldly in charge and so different from our lipsticked,  domesticated mothers?

True, they were somber and strict and they taught us some silly things, such as (this from my German nuns) the proper way to sleep at night:  flat on our backs, our arms straight along our sides "and not the hands going all over the body."  They were obsessed with punctuality, posture, and penmanship .

But they also dinned into us the necessity of being good.  They taught us the nightly examination of conscience, which meant going over the day with a fine-toothed comb, looking for sins venial and mortal and also for good actions.  In the case of the latter we learned to ask ourselves, "Did I give my allowance to charity only to impress my teacher, or because I truly wanted to help?"

At the beginning and end of every class, we would stand by our desks, lower our eyes, and say a prayer.  Although they didn't call it "centering," that is what it was, and it was a useful habit to develop early.

The nuns taught us discipline, and kept things in order.  My classmates and I may, during those years of strict obedience, have had some of our exuberance stymied, but we never had to worry about being bullied or, in our co-ed high school, being threatened by boys.  And I never, in twelve years of nun schooling, saw anybody's knuckles being rapped.

In the pre-feminist 1950s there weren't many role models for girls.  But we Catholic-school pupils had them, every day, and we learned that women in authority could be smart and fair but also petty and fallible--human, in short.

Whether they knew it or not, nuns were feminists by definition and history. The founder of the order of my German nuns was a 16th-century Yorkshire woman named Mary Ward.  She wanted to affirm the role of women in the Church and in society, and to tend to their spiritual, intellectual and psychological development.  Inspired by the Jesuits--the most intellectual of the male orders--she structured her order along parallel lines and left her nuns uncloistered, something highly unusual for the time.

I believe that our fear of nuns was partly dictated by an unconscious sexism, a rebellion against women who were so unapologetically in charge and who, at least within the confines of school and convent, did not have to obey, make themselves attractive to, or in any way propitiate men.

So I apologize to you, Mater Leonarda, Madre Mercedes, Sister Dominica, wherever you are, for having made you the topic of too many party stories.  Thank you for keeping me safe, for forcing me to perform in the face of fear, and for teaching me the habit of self reflection.  You were tough, and you were women, and we found--and still find--that combination hard to swallow.  But that wasn't your fault.

Virgin Martyrs

She's getting better.  She'll need a lot of rehabilitation, but she may eventually recover her faculties, say the Scottish doctors who are caring for her in a hospital that specializes in the treatment of soldiers wounded in Afghanistan. 

Malala Yousoufzai, the Pakistani girl who was shot in the head by the Taliban for espousing education for girls, wants to become a doctor.  Her father thinks she has a talent for politics.  If you have heard her speak in the warbling English of the Indian sub-continent, you know he has a point. 

Have you seen her face?  Blazing Byzantine eyes under assertive eyebrows, and the cheeks of a child.  She's only fourteen.

Her age and those eyes and that fierceness bring to mind my own patron saint, Eulalia of Barcelona.  She was a year younger than Malala when, in the fourth century, she marched to the palace of Dacian, the Roman consul who was carrying out the emperor Diocletian's persecution of Christians.  Unlike other virgin martyrs of the times--Agnes and Lucy, who died defending their chastity--her cause was purely political:  she told Dacian that he should leave the Christians in peace.

In response he: 

put her in a nail-studded barrel and rolled her down a hill that today bears her name;

cut off her breasts;

nailed her to an x-shaped cross and tried to set her on fire;  and

when the fire wouldn't catch, decapitated her.  According to legend, when she finally died a dove flew out of her mouth.

It's lucky for Malala that the Taliban have guns, which are quicker than nail-studded barrels, and that Scottish doctors have the means to heal her.

But basically the two stories are the same:  two girls on the cusp of puberty, virginal in the sense that the adult of world of compromise and cowardice hasn't yet touched them, seeing clearly what is right, what is wrong, and what needs to be done.  Little soldiers, striking terror in the hearts of their upper-class, educated parents, and a responsive chord in the hearts of millions.

Seven centuries after her martyrdom, from her marble sarcophagus in Barcelona's gothic cathedral, Eulalia inspires the city's children to courage.  And because she was still a kid when she died, the annual celebration on her February feastday features giants and dragons processing through the ancient streets, and all kinds of fireworks and games.

I hope no doves fly out of Malala anytime soon.  I hope that she will be loved and celebrated into her old age.  And that she will some day be revered throughout Islam and beyond as the patron saint of a new generation of educated girls.