Ambitious Apron: Mother is a Closet Polyglot

Ambitious Apron: Mother is a Closet Polyglot

We had no idea.

She hid behind the safe places.

She put on the disguise

and portrayed the staid

design of predictable

colors and patterns.

The choice of red, maybe,

Was evidence of bold.

Now we know.

Mother is a polyglot.

She speaks Cinderella and Spanish,

French and Esperanto.

She is fluent in Sleeping Beauty

And in Aramaic.

She can read musical notation

As well as slang,

And her calligraphy is meticulous

Through Mandarin, cuneiform, and hieroglyph.

Scherezade comes to her in THE original language.

She listens to the news in vernacular

and hears it with her heart.

She speaks indigenous

as well as ingenious.

She speaks in tongues.

Mother reads the news in

all the many codes of despair,

Yet she can tell you the etymology

of marmalade as she ladles it hot into jars.

Mother can sing sweet ditties

In baby babble,

And unravel the tangled

Threads of Babel.

Mother is a closet polyglot.

Audacious Apron: Mother is of Two Minds

Audacious Apron: Mother is of Two Minds

Mind #1:

These muddy browns and muted greens are perfectly good colors!

Your father was wearing brown shoes on the day we met.

This green is practical.

Brown is embedded in the earth and that’s a good thing.

Brown and green form a reliable base; feet planted firmly in soil.

Rooted and stationary in the natural and organic order of the universe.

Mind #2:

My name should have been Sojourner or Mecca or Athene or Poseidon or Mercury, that one with wings.

I could have been happy as one of those women who traveled the world:

Nellie Bly, Gertrude Bell, Amelia Earhart, ……

Brown says “stick in the mud, stuck at home making the best of it.”

I walk by the sea and collect starfish skeletons and sharp teeth shed by sharks.

From Thailand, I gain blue horizons and wild proliferation.

Mind #1:

The thrifty housewife is the happy housewife.

Make do is the motto of imagination.

Leftovers are better than money in the bank.

Mind #2:

I want to spend my life with great abandon!

Joy is a bottomless, heart-shaped bucket.

For once, I WILL shoot my own arrow and follow it through the galaxy!

(c) 2018 "A is for Apron: Tales from the Domesticity Jungle," Artwork, Narratives, and Poetry by Josephine Carubia, Ph.D.

Auspicious Apron: Mother Has a Wild Heart

A is for Apron #1

Auspicious Apron: Mother Has a Wild Heart

One side of the apron is an updated version of the traditional patchwork.  Patchwork is an art form that utilizes the diminutive detritus of primary textile construction projects.  For example, a woman fabricates a new garment every year for each of her daughters to wear for the first day of school. She saves all of the material scraps in a basket.  Eventually, she has a stash of odd shaped pieces and random strips that call out to be arranged in juxtapositions of color and texture.  She saves the scraps for the purposes of thrift, but she will mobilize them for the purposes of delight. One day, her artistic sensibility kicks into overdrive and she presses all the wrinkled pieces with a hot iron and begins to stitch them together forming a collage of abstractions. The piece grows organically: a triangle added here on this side, and a rectangle fit along this other side, with perhaps an irresistible and original polygon as anchor at some sort of off-kilter center.

The developing patchwork has no extrinsic orientation of top or bottom, but it develops a personality as it grows.  It begins to express preferences: “Here I need a bright red!” or “I fancy a geometric pattern next to this floral,” and “Yes, this IS up and THIS is down.”  The choices emerging from the basket of scraps are multitudinous and subtle. A pair of scissors may be as significant as an artist’s brush or knife in fine-tuning the thrust of a particular shade or shape. Eventually, the amorphous construction reaches a level of maturity and commitment. The patchwork becomes an apron. 

But, in the practice of patchwork, the woman herself has also been gathered and transformed.  She recognizes herself in the process and knows that she is more than a basket of gently used and useful qualities. She forges her own coherent statement of desire from the disparate urges set aside over the years. Still, she will keep the new fabric of herself hidden (but ready for action) on the reverse of her domestic utility; the patchwork apron.  Did her family guess at what was hidden beneath her quiet competence? In retrospect, her daughters will not be surprised to learn that their mother had a wild heart.

A is for Apron

A is for Apron: Auspicious, Audacious, Ambitious

Tales from the Domesticity Jungle, 2018

Artwork, Narratives, and Poetry by Josephine Carubia, Ph.D.

This photo is of me (center) and two of my friends in the International Women's Book Group, Azza Hussein (left) and Duygu Sevasci (right).  They kindly agreed to model my Audacious Aprons at one of our meetings.

This entry is an overview of the project.  The introduction is below and subsequent posts will be focused on each of the aprons. 

Introduction:

The apron is a garment of domesticity. It signifies the seemingly insignificant labor of women in the containment of the home kitchen.  The apron covers and conceals potential and strength while claiming to protect delicacy and beauty.

The professional male (or female) chef may wear an apron, but it is structurally a different apron. Moreover, it is worn under the sign of the chef’s hat (toque), which dominates the view.  The chef’s apron is also diminished in significance by the chef’s coat which broadens the shoulders and visibly projects dominance.

The aprons in this “Abstract, Bold, Conceptual” artwork were constructed with a paper pattern called “Church Ladies Apron.”* The narrative implied in the pattern title is that “do-gooding” women—often in the extraneous years after raising their children—are baking cookies and cakes, and arranging flowers and ceramic elephants for the church penny social.  They are not executive women, not tech-savvy women, not explorers, not officials.  They are not even WOMEN; they are “ladies.”                These reimagined/reconstructed aprons have two distinct sides, presenting two aspects of a woman.  One side may represent her traditional roles and the expectations of her family.  The opposite side reveals her true aspirations, inclinations, and genius.  These are the first three aprons of an endless series.

*“Church Ladies’ Apron Pattern,” ©Mary Mulari Designs