“WELL,” my friend said diplomatically, “they certainly don’t owe you anything.”
We stood in silence looking at the two sets of formerly beautiful, heavy, floor-length sitting-room curtains. The gorgeous fabric for them had cost a small fortune at a time that I really couldn’t afford it, back when we had just built the house. The shop had sent someone to come and take measurements and had taken over all the responsibility of making the curtains.
Those curtains certainly owed me nothing. They looked fabulous and lasted extremely well; 30 years of small children, birthday parties, coal fires, summer sunshine, endless pulling and dragging.
Now the edges were sun-faded, the strong lining tarnished.
It was time. And, as I had explained to my friend, everything else was now in place.
A new colour scheme for the room had been chosen on the basis of a beautiful painting of the sea, given to us as a birthday gift. The paint was organised. New cushions had been bought. The painting was ready to be hung.
But the curtains.
See, the marvellous fabric shop was gone and I suddenly remembered that having anything to do with measuring, ordering, or buying curtains makes me really nervous.
I had already searched for new fabric. I had backed away in a panic when I saw something I liked.
Everything came to a halt.
My friend looked at me curiously.
“What’s the problem with curtains?” she asked.
I avoided her eyes.
In fairness, now, how do you explain that the thought of getting new curtains gives you a dose of PTSD?
Even to somebody who knows you extremely well; someone who knows that, while you have a definite tendency to over-think things, you’re not an out-and-out basket case?
“There was this nun,” I told her. “Back in the 1970s.”
When I moved to second-level, Domestic Science was, unfortunately for everyone concerned, one of my subjects.
As my father-in-law was to tell me kindly many years later, while I had plenty in the head, not everybody could have it in the hands too.
So, I became the trial and tribulation of this nun. I was a source of endless bewilderment and sorrow to her. She once commented that she had never, not in all her decades of teaching, come across the likes of me.
From first year to Inter Cert (it was still the Inter Cert then), I hemmed the same sorry bit of pink gingham for an apron. All the others moved on to patterns for cutting out and sewing pretty summer dresses and fancy trousers and so on, but three years after I entered second-level, I was still tacking and hemming that same, increasingly grubby, bit of apron.
Every September, my classmates would arrive carrying increasingly sophisticated Simplicity patterns, reels of thread and neatly folded yards of fabric, and Sr H would instruct me, in exhausted tones, to take out the by-now ragged piece of dingy gingham, unpick last year’s stitches, and start hemming again.
I googled hemming for this column to explain what it was I was supposed to be doing, because I don’t think I ever really understood it.
The catch stitch is the best way to hem because, while the stitches are visible on the inside, they are virtually invisible on the outside.
Done correctly, the threads form a zig-zag pattern on the inside with just the tiniest stitch on the outside.
I don’t remember what Sr H called it, but my stitches were never barely visible and they formed neither consistent zig-zag patterns on the inside nor tiny neat stitches on the outside.
I hated and feared Domestic Science and it’s only now that I realise the whole thing was probably a similar ordeal for both myself and Sr H; a mutual Calvary of bewilderment and frustration.
The sewing was bad enough. But when it came to entering the Domestic Science Cookery Room to make Basic Shortcrust Pastry, I came out in a rash.
I generally made it through the first step, sieving the floor into a large bowl, adding in the diced butter and rubbing it in with my fingertips until the mixture resembled breadcrumbs.
It was Step Two, where you had to add the liquid little by little to form a dough, that was the problem.
Eventually, other students would pityingly pass me small lumps of their perfect pastry. I would quickly clump all the little balls together and roll out them out.
Funny, Sr H never seemed to notice how my pastry seemed to have so many patches of different colour in it.
Years later, when I found balls of different squeezed-together bits of old, worn-out Playdough in one of the children’s bedrooms, I realised that’s what my teenage pastry resembled.
Although my pastry was way worse than out-of-date Playdough...
After the Inter Cert, I switched to Biology, which was an absolute doddle in comparison.
The apron was never finished, but Sr H and I got to sleep through school-nights.
And that, I explained to my friend, is why I get PTSD over curtains.
“But you never had to make curtains,” my friend said.
She tried to cover a snort, very obviously visualising what curtains made by me would look like.
“No,” I said coldly, “I didn’t.”
“I think my PTSD is about fabric. Any kind of fabric that I have to think about that hasn’t been measured or sewn by somebody else.”
My friend looked firmly at me, then at the pots of paint, the new cushions, the sea-painting - and then at the faded curtains drooping over the windows.
“Don’t be ridiculous. Just buy ready-made.”
“But then I’d have to measure the windows and calculate lengths and widths and stuff and I’d get it all wrong,” I whined.
“I have Curtain PTSD.”
My friend folded her arms.
“I don’t know what to say to you, Grown Woman” she said.
And she went home.
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