Ben nodded slowly.
“She doesn’t see me as someone who would really, seriously, permanently not be okay with this,” I said. “She sees me as someone who’ll object and then come around. And I don’t know if that’s because I have come around in the past, or because she has an idea of who I am that doesn’t match who I actually am.”
“Maybe both,” Ben said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe both.”
He went back to his book. I went back to mine. This is also marriage: the capacity to have that kind of conversation and then just go back to reading.
## On Craft and Ownership
I want to push on something that I think went unspoken in a lot of the conversations I had with my mother and, to a lesser extent, with Elise: the question of what it means to own something you made.
When you buy an object, ownership is transactional. You exchange money for a thing. The thing is yours. The history of the thing before you owned it belongs to whoever owned it before. There is no labor of yours in it.
When you make something, the relationship is different. The object carries your time. It carries your knowledge and your choices and the specific decisions you made at each stage. It is, in a way that is hard to fully articulate, a record of who you were while you were making it.
The dress is a record of the year I got engaged. The Tuesday evenings when Ben was doing something and I had the couch and the light from the lamp and the thread and a podcast playing quietly. The Saturday afternoons when I had more time and could work for three hours straight. The September Saturday when I finished the final embroidered motif and held the overskirt hem up to the light and thought: there it is.