coucougracie

[coucougracie]

the cookie tin metaphor

When I was maybe eight or nine, wandering around the house in mid-evening with no company except for the headache I had been sporting for the past hour because of mint chewing gum, I would snoop around my mother’s room and find a metal tin of what appeared to be Danish butter cookies. 

Upon opening it, all that I would find was needles and bundles of thread and buttons.

It was disappointing, for a hungry nine year old me. Why would I want needles and push-pins when I could be munching on cookies? I asked my mother endlessly about this, but I never seemed to get a satisfying-enough answer. All I wanted was for the pretty, shiny cookie tin to actually have sweets in it, like expected, but instead, I was always met with thread (not even in the color pink) and plain buttons.

Soon I stopped asking my mother so many questions, and instead I shifted my attention to social media. As I grew old enough to have a presence online, I would see videos and poems online depicting motherhood. Tiktoks about “the feminine urge” to become a housewife and have seven children on a farm. Pinterest collages featuring beautiful Scandi blondes in long white dresses and ribbons, holding babies with wide smiles on their faces. They were described to be gentle and maternal, as all mothers should be, without a prickly bone in their body.

Upon seeing these videos for the first time and noticing that my mother is not always as patient or gentle as the mothers in the videos, I was convinced that I was incredibly profound for claiming that she was the worst person on Earth. I used the cookie tin as a metaphor to say, “I wish my mother was as sweet and lovely as the delectable Danish butter cookies I had been promised, but instead all I find are sharp needles and disappointment.”

However, my metaphor came to fall flat as I grew. When the late winter rain in Northern California struck, and the ends of my too-baggy pants would get wet from puddles, my mother would take the cookie tin and hem the ends so that I could walk home from school with dry ankles. The neck pillow of Winnie the Pooh I had been gifted by an aunt had received many spine surgeries from my mother over the years; stitches made of threads now run up his back, holding him together. When I had to untangle friendship bracelets, I would dig into the cookie tin and find a needle to weave through the tiny chains.

My thoughts on the cookie tin have changed. What used to be dissatisfaction has grown into appreciation. The picturesque farm scenes and 1860s chemises online, like the inviting outside of the tin, are just the tip of the iceberg and are not always an accurate depiction of what mothers do. 

The needles and threads are not inviting or appealing, but the inside of that cookie tin holds more warmth and love than any Tiktok moodboard. Those paint motherhood as sweetness and endless patience, paired with lovely dresses and bright smiles. But mothers do not always have to be pristine and perfect. The prickliness and bumps in a mother-child relationship, like those of the threads and needles, are miniscule in comparison to the beauty of what mothers do for the world and the functionality of the sewing supplies.

How many women in the history of the universe have prevailed through motherhood without perfectly coiffed hair or someone to take their photo? How many mothers have used a thread and needle to mend their child’s clothes, no matter what arguments or bitterness between them? How long does the line of affection go?

The answer feels too heavy for me alone to know. For now, however, I will sit on the edge of the bed and watch my mother hem my new skirt. The cookie tin is balanced in my lap. To me, nothing will ever be as "aesthetic".