From Silks to Scrubs

Many years ago, a fortune-teller looked at my palm and told me in a dramatic voice that I would lead two lives. At the time, I was happily married and the mother of three small children. I couldn't imagine wanting any other life, and worried about what her words could mean. I wasn't willing to exchange the good life I already had, so it was a lingering source of worry, sort of like an intermittent headache.

It wasn't until this year, well into my fifties and visiting a "sheep to shawl" festival, that I finally understood that I was already living the other life. In fact, I've had my feet firmly planted in two worlds all along.

I'm the third generation of my family to be involved with handsewing and clothing design. I grew up as the granddaughter of a French seamstress. While other kids played teacher or jumped rope, my cousins and I went up into an attic filled with dressmaker dummies and trunks of multicolored fabric. We rolled ourselves up in bolts of cloth, glued buttons onto cardboard, and practiced embroidering with cotton floss on Swedish hardanger cloth. Grandma's leftovers became curtains for our theater productions, veils for our weddings, and ball gowns for our imaginary dances. We made doll clothes for all sizes of babies, and won ribbons at the 4-H fairs.

When I reached my teens, it was decided that I would major in textiles – I would be the first in my family to "do it right." I would go to college, major in what was then called home economics, and continue to do what I already knew and loved. No alterations done out of a shop behind the house for me! I saw a world of fancy shops and designer clothes waiting. That is, it was my vision until I took my first pattern making class. Alas, I just wasn't as good as I needed to be. I was too lazy to measure, lacking in precision, and not very good at selecting just the right braid or clasp for my future wealthy and demanding clientele.

Disappointed at not living up to everyone's hopes, I switched programs at school. I traded a life of designing textiles for one wearing scrubs. I became a nurse, something I had secretly hoped for all along.

I loved nursing from the minute I stepped through the hospital door. Patients needed me, and I couldn't wait to help. I soaked up information on medications, dressings, and illness, and spent extra time on the floors following behind my nurse mentors. I knew that nursing was what I was meant to do.

But with my down time I continued to knit. Blankets, hats, sweaters, and coats all tumbled off the points of my knitting needles. While others sat chatting with coffee and a magazine, I pulled out my needles and a ball of yarn. I brought in patterns to share and eventually taught most of the other nurses on my floor the basics.

And I found there were similarities … instead of a tape measure around my neck, I now had a stethoscope dangling on my chest. At a bedside, I felt along a patient's warm wrist for a pulse, but at home I fingered the fuzzy stitches on the long needle. I looked up at the monitor and counted heartbeats, or I looked down at the work in my lap and counted the rows. In the hospital I was immersed in a world of pastel colors and of the smells of antiseptics, clean linen, and soap, while the sounds of beeps, call bells, buzzers, and pagers sounded in my ears. But at home, I'd listen to classical music, or enjoy the stillness, and I'd smell the wooly fibers while I ran the rich colors and silky textures through my busy fingers. Here, my basket of yarn held a riot of colors and difficult to identify plastic gizmos, used for all kinds of procedures, much like the assortment of items placed on the tray for the doctor to use in surgery.

How had I not noticed that what I loved doing was nearly the same whether I was at work or at home?

Two different worlds they are, yet they are not so far apart. One defines me professionally, while the other helps to keep me sane. Until this year I had dreaded finding the other life that the gypsy had foretold, not realizing that I had always had one foot there. Two lives I have, two that are not so different, and two that continually enrich each other, to the benefit of my career and mental health.

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