Thanks for the Mems

After posting photos of newly completed memory quilts on social media, I received a text from my friend, Renada. The pictures I shared were of a quilt made by me and my mom for my oldest son, Zach. It is called a memory quilt because it is made from blocks of Zach’s childhood t-shirts.

Renada had similar memory quilts made for her two daughters. Seeing my post, she realized that although her grown daughters moved out, the quilts didn’t. They were still in Renada’s closet.

After a text inquiry to her daughters, Renada shared with me the summary of their collective responses.

“Love the mems, Mom, so love the quilt! Just doesn’t go with my décor.”

From then on, whenever I looked at one of our finished or in-progress quilts, I would think of the catchphrase ‘love the mems’. Our quilted labors of love were capturing the boys’ wonderful childhood memories (the ‘mems’).

Or so I thought.

The project started when the boys were still in grade school. My seamstress mom told me not to pitch or donate old uniforms or outgrown shirts that marked places in time for them.

“Save them for a memory quilt. We will make them when the boys are older.”

With this insightful statement, operation t-shirt collection officially began. On the various trips my parents would make to visit my family in Omaha, I would send a bag of t-shirts back with them. They were stored and stacked in Mom’s closet in Arizona as they awaited their post-graduation quilt creation.

Mom made my nephew’s memory quilt first and got the process down pat. It was very time intensive, but the final product was a work of art. After the COVID year and I started traveling again, Mom and I thought a great project for us to work on together would be the boys’ memory quilts.

We started with Zach, the oldest of the Lane boys. I pulled out the mounds of t-shirts accumulated over the years in Mom’s Kingman, Arizona sewing room closet. I was having a ball rehashing old memories from the different stages in the boys’ lives that each shirt represented. From a tiny birthday souvenir shirt from Chuck E. Cheese to an 8th-grade graduation shirt with all the classmate names on the back, I relished remembering these little moments in time.

Early in the sorting, I stumbled on a problem. I couldn’t remember all the shirt owners. The many peewee baseball shirts and the shared hand-me-downs were the biggest issues. I was having a really hard time remembering which boy played for which team. I didn’t even know where to start on the hand-me-downs as these t-shirts were worn by all three boys.

Mom and I burned the midnight oil working on quilt #1 while organizing t-shirt squares for subsequent quilts #2 and #3. While we were cutting, prepping, pressing, and sewing the multiple-sized quilt pieces together, I was struggling with identifying the last stack of shirts.

Trying to avoid a bottleneck in our quilting process, I started a group text with all three boys. The goal was for the boys to happily claim their shirts while we enjoyed some convo down memory lane.

I did not get the response I expected.

Sample texts in prolonged group exchange (resulting in few claimed shirts):

Me: “Who played for the Diamondbacks?” <photo of uniform shirt attached>

Zach: “Wasn’t that Grant?”

Grant: “I don’t remember playing for the Diamondbacks”

This type of interchange continued with the boys unclear on which teams they played on, some overlapping with the same names. Wanting answers to move forward, I started to get impatient. Responses were slow (definitely not fun) and they didn’t even seem very interested. I couldn’t believe that after ALL those years of dragging them to ALL those baseball practices and games, no one remembered. How could that be possible?

Ben: “Mom, do we have to include the baseball uniforms on the quilt? If we do, just guess whose they are.”

Hmmmmm….

Does a memory quilt serve its purpose if the memory wasn’t worth remembering?

Stubbornly not wanting to make the call of throwing the baseball tees to the side (as I couldn’t let go of the fact that I had meticulously collected them for years and then Mom drove them across the country for this exact purpose), I moved on to the hand-me-downs.

For some shirts, no one knew or cared. For others, there was a war on who got to claim it for their quilt. Then there were the shirts that I loved but they didn’t care. Even with my sharing of my fond memory attached to the Chuck E. Cheese shirt, the boy owner of the shirt still did not seem to care.

Grant: “Maybe you should use it for your own quilt, Mom”

Exactly. This was THEIR memory quilt, not mine. I was so hell-bent to include all of the memories I thought were important, I was missing the point that we all have our own unique memories, bad and good (AND those not everyone even remembers).

There were a few baseball tees that made the cut, but most went in the trash. Some hand-me-down shared shirts were negotiated, and each boy had the final say in what ultimately made their quilt. They even requested to add shirts that were in their possession that they later shipped to us.

I soon had the same experience with the memorabilia I had saved through their childhood. As each went through his box, I was shocked at what was meaningful to them and what wasn’t. The quilt experience opened my eyes and this process made it crystal clear. Some memories were important to them and some memories were important to me. And these did not need to be the same. If I wanted to keep their discards, these were mine to keep.

My dad often reminds me that not everyone loves the past. That is a very good reminder as Mom and I relish in the past and often assume everyone else does too. Most of our collaborative projects center around sharing memories. The t-shirt and memorabilia projects with my sons have taught me that my perception is not necessarily their reality.

Memories are individual to the person. We can share in memories but cherish and remember them differently. And that is perfectly okay. Our life story is built on the collection of life moments in the past. Some stay with us and some don’t. And then we choose which ones we want to hold close as treasured memories.

Mom and I finished off the first round of memory quilts for the Lane boys as a collaborative effort with their input. After receiving his quilt, Zach asked if there was any way he could have a second for his spare bedroom (Note to my friend, Renada – Boys obviously don’t care about the quilts matching their décor). Ben also asked if he could have a quilt with just Barry’s Bar t-shirts. These were shirts from his college job that he had saved, not me.

Loving a good project and their design ideas, Mom and I made two more quilts. Zach’s #2 is full of his favorite sports teams, video games, and childhood-themed memories. I also had fabric squares made up of colorful Andy Warhol motifs of his dogs. A Zach-inspired memory quilt!

Ben’s NU quilt is in the works and will be finished on my next trip to Kingman. He was very excited to see his beloved Barry’s shirts in a Husker red design for his soon-to-be game-day throw blanket.

We all love the good mems…once we are allowed to choose which ones count for us.

Thanks for the mems, boys. I enjoyed going down my own memory lane during this project. And also thanks for allowing me to make new cherished quilting memories with your Grandma Mary. We had a ball!

Working on the mem quilts designed by the boys

The Quilting Process