I put it toward the thread and supplies I had bought for the repair and the money Rosa had charged for the stabilization, and I had some left over. I bought fabric with the rest. Not for anything specific. For something, someday.
## What I Know Now That I Didn’t Know Before
I know that my mother decides in advance what I will agree to and that the deciding feels to her like the same as asking. I know this is a pattern and not a single incident. I know that I had allowed the pattern to function for years by coming around, and that coming around taught her it was safe to skip the asking.
I know that Elise finds it easier to route through my mother than to come to me directly, and that I had never told her clearly that she could come to me directly and I would give her a fair answer even when the answer was no.
I know that I can say a hard true thing and not be destroyed by the saying. This sounds small but it isn’t. I spent a lot of years believing, in some unexamined way, that saying the true hard thing would cause a collapse of some kind — the relationship, the family equilibrium, something. The dress situation required me to say the true hard thing multiple times to multiple people, and none of the collapses I feared materialized. Things got harder and then they got somewhat better and life continued.