15-year-old:  Wow, that’s cool.

Me: Thanks!

15-year-old: It must be teaching you patience.

Me:  Child.  Raising you teaches me patience. Sewing is what I do to relax.

15-year-old: That’s wonderful.  That you could find something other than food to help you relax.

Sigh.

In fairness to the tactless adolescent living in our house, I have been making a concerted effort to eat properly, and he is fully aware of that.  I actually think that *he* thinks those are words of encouragement. It’s almost like he’s new around here.

The other day I found a “journal”, a spiral bound notebook, from when I was 14. I looked over the scribbles and cringed myself into a fetal position…pages and pages of teenage angst. So-and-so likes this guy, but he likes another girl and this one didn’t talk to me today at school, but another guy wanted to call me after meeting at the roller rink.  OMG. Could I be any more of a living breathing cliche?

Anyway, the point is, I wrote pages and pages about my weight. At 14, I went to Weight Watchers for the first time, and I weighed 104 lbs. It was the end of the world.

Yes, that’s Donny Osmond.

A little more digging and I found the rest of them.  An archive of my weight, my life, my loves.  You know you have them too, somewhere.

And I started thinking about the themes that run through our lives.

What are yours?

Do you have a way to revisit some of them and see if you’ve made any progress?

I imagine that this is the work of our lives…to choose the colors, to find the patterns, to do the hard work, and to make something out of nothing. Again and again. Over and over, and with any luck, we evolve.

We learn a little patience, a little perseverance, and we learn from mistakes. (Well, at least some of the time).

And, maybe, like me, you have some battles that just drag on and on.

As we get a little softer around the edges, those old battles aren’t quite so fierce any more.  We can slow down and enjoy the details and the journey.

And maybe, at the end, when all the quilts are done and all the notebooks are filled up, we’ll have something to show for it.

Maybe.