It was right. Not the same as it had been. Right for what it was now.
## What I Told My Coworker
I have a coworker, Priya, who knows about the dress situation because I told her during a lunch break when I was still in the middle of it and needed to say the story out loud to someone outside my immediate circle. Priya is a pattern maker, which means she also works in garment construction, which means she understands at a cellular level what nine months of hand embroidery means.
When I told her, she was quiet for a moment and then said, ‘Who cuts hand embroidery without asking the person who made it?’
‘Apparently my mother,’ I said.
‘And then asked you to fix it.’
‘And then asked me to fix it.’
Priya shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. Just that. No.
I appreciated the clarity. Sometimes the simplest response to a complicated situation is the one that cuts to the actual point: no. You don’t cut someone’s hand embroidery without their consent. You don’t ask them to fix the thing you damaged without their consent. No.
Priya also said something else that I’ve thought about a lot: ‘The thing about working with your hands is that people who don’t do it always think it’s less real than work that involves screens and meetings. They can see the output but they can’t really feel the time that went into it.’
She’s right. The dress is a silk dress with some embroidery. If you don’t make things with your hands, the dress is the artifact, and the artifact is visible and assessable. The nine months are invisible. They’re in the dress, but you have to know how to read them. My mother can look at the cuffs and know they’re hand-embroidered and even know they took a long time, in the abstract. She cannot quite feel the time in them the way I do or the way Priya does. That gap is not her fault. But it made it easier for her to discount.