"Dear Homemaker,"

This is how the manual to my mother's sewing machine, which I've recently inherited, starts out. "Look!" I crowed to Pants, "It's Sears enforcing gender roles through appliances! Ha, ha!" And then I sat down to try to put thread into the thing and quickly realized that what I initially read as a derogatory term subtly implying limited horizons was really, when applied to me, the equivalent of saying, "Dear Nuclear Physicist,..."

Threading a sewing machine actually made me break out in a cold sweat. First, I had to identify the parts, whose names don't even come close to describing what they look like. Do you know where the "feed dogs" are? Am I the only one who sees that as a command and not a name? Evidently, feed dogs are the little cloven chrome thing* on either side of the jabbing needle, whose eye, by the way, is on the wrong end.

*(A more accurate name for the feed dogs, Sears, would be "Satan's foot," because that's what it looks like. I don't know where you got dogs out of that.)

Perhaps we're alpine climbing now to the very heights of idiocy, but honestly, two threads? Sewing machines have to use two separate spools of thread at once? The manual goes on to explain different kinds of stitches, varying needle gauges for different fabrics, and probably the process of calculating mass for black holes, but once I got the thing threaded, I walked out of the room, cracked open a beer and congratulated myself.

The reason I'm making this ill-fated foray into proper sewing is that soon Pants will be reaching a major milestone in his military career, and some anachronistic custom requires that wives create a banner proclaiming said event to hang in the front window. Initially the idea seemed so antiquated and bizarre, like leaving fresh pies to cool on the window sill, or churning butter, or any of the million things that no one bothers with these days, that I thought for sure Pants would scoff at the idea. "A banner in the window? What am I, a boy scout? Is it my birthday party?" But instead, he nodded and muttered, "Hmf-- cool," which in Pants' lexicon means, "I enthusiastically endorse this practice! I must have one!"

I was fully prepared to grumble and botch my way through this, cobbling together some kind of lumpy and vaguely obscene attempt at a banner, and then hanging it up only after everyone had had a few drinks, and then maybe taking it out back and letting people throw darts at it-- but then I happened to mention the banner to my mom. There's something about Mom Enthusiasm*, that bright, can-do pep talk in the face of ridiculously bad odds, that's intoxicating. "That sounds fun!" she cried, and I partially believed her. Off we went to Joann Fabrics.

*If my mom had proposed the idea of a troop surge in Iraq with a good dose of Mom Enthusiasm, the country would be all for it. Of course, my mom is not corrupt, misguided, or a moron, so it's a moot point.

Since then, it's taken quite a hefty assist from my mom to keep the banner alive and developing. The magpie in me loved the part where we collected a rainbow of different colors and textures of fabric, and then when we opted for the more ambitious route of piecing together a design based on a quilt pattern, I was all for it. In fact, if she'd suggested we incorporate tessellations into the design, and then custom dye our fabrics with the juices of ground berries, I probably would have said, "Awesome! Sounds easy." But when the rulers came out and math got involved, my enthusiasm and confidence took a sharp nosedive.

If my mom and I were partners and this was a school project, she'd be the girl who does 80% of the work and then patiently explains to me what "we" did on the day it was due. I'm used to being on the other side of that arrangement, so to be so blatantly benefiting from someone else's efforts is humbling. Without question, if I'd had to put together the parts that she's done so far, I would easily have destroyed at least one room in our house by now, and possibly killed my dog. I'm that bad with fabric.

So now I'm working on my 20%, some precision hand-stitching that I think I can manage, since I went through an offensive needlepoint phase last winter and made Pants a semi-pornographic tea towel. Oh right, and then I need to sew a border on the whole thing using the Superconducting Super Collider sewing machine.

(One final ego-saving rationalization: asking a modern woman to thread and operate a sewing machine is comparable to asking a woman magically transported to the present from thirty years ago to debug Windows. Right? Oh, man...)