{"id":458,"date":"2026-05-15T12:01:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T16:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stillmeinhere.com\/?p=458"},"modified":"2026-05-02T13:50:19","modified_gmt":"2026-05-02T17:50:19","slug":"pieces-from-scraps-to-a-beautiful-masterpiece-flaws-included","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stillmeinhere.com\/?p=458","title":{"rendered":"Pieces: From Scraps to a Beautiful Masterpiece, Flaws Included"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Marisa is the first subject in the Still Me in Here Portrait Series, black and white photographs of women 40+ paired with the stories that shaped them. You can find her work at @marisasmusequilts<\/a> on Instagram. Go look. It’s worth every minute. If something in this piece makes something light up in your own chest, I’d love to hear from you. Email me. Your story is worth telling too \ud83d\udda4<\/em><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

There is a quilt in progress somewhere in Marisa’s world at almost any given moment. Fabric swatches arrive in my messages with quiet regularity \u2014 this one or this one?<\/em> \u2014 and I have learned that the question is never really about the fabric. It’s about the pattern. It’s about what belongs next to what. It’s about understanding that the pieces that don’t make the final cut aren’t failures. They’re just not the right fit for this particular story. I have been watching Marisa make things from pieces for as long as I have known her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We met the way a lot of women meet \u2014 through our daughters, through the beautiful chaos of someone else’s schedule briefly colliding with ours. Her oldest and my oldest were in kindergarten together. That was nearly twenty years ago. I remember her showing up to collect her daughter, who had made herself completely at home in my recliner, zoned out in front of SpongeBob, thoroughly unbothered. We were both working full time. We were both doing the mom thing. We were both, I suspect, running on fumes and sheer will and not talking about it. The friendship didn’t announce itself. It just showed up, the way the best ones do, and stayed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She has been part of some of the biggest moments of my life. She was there when Emily was born. She was there when my mom died. I called her hysterical, crying and pacing the driveway, and she asked exactly one question: what do you need?<\/em> She showed up to the calling hours with her Mary Poppins bag and the kind of practical love that doesn’t get enough credit. Mini bottles and gum to cover the scent. No casserole. No platitudes. Just her, fully present, completely prepared, knowing exactly what the moment called for without being asked twice. She has been the steady, trusted presence my girls could turn to when they felt they couldn’t come to me and I have never once doubted her direction with them. Not for a single second.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are relationships in life that don’t turn out the way you hoped. People you love where the gap between what you needed and what was given is something you learn to carry quietly. I have had those. What I can tell you is that I have never truly felt the weight of what was missing in the family department, and the reason for that has a name. It’s Marisa. She has given me more in that capacity than she will ever fully know, without expectation, without strings, without ever once making me feel like it was anything other than exactly what it was supposed to be. You don’t always get to choose your family. But sometimes, if you’re lucky, the right person just shows up in your recliner with your kid watching SpongeBob, and twenty years later you realize the universe knew exactly what it was doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This isn’t my story. It’s hers. I just happen to be lucky enough to be a part of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marisa grew up knowing she wanted more than what was immediately in front of her. The dream was a Bed and Breakfast, her own space, her own kitchen, her love of home and animals and people poured into something tangible. She went to college young to learn how to cook and run a business and told herself she’d never move back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“The world was big and I was going to chase all the opportunities.”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

So she did. She landed in luxury hotels, hard charging, she calls it, and she means it without apology. Every extra assignment, every task, every project, every overtime shift she could get her hands on. She moved up fast. She figured out she was good at numbers, that business operations lit something up in her, that finance was where she could shine. Seeking is the word she uses, and it’s the right one. Not lost, not confused, but actively looking for something she couldn’t quite name yet. Not floundering. Just a woman who knew there was something more to find and hadn’t stopped looking for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I knew I liked expensive tastes and I had to earn it myself.”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

She earned it. But somewhere in the middle of all that earning, standing in a luxury hotel making sure a guest paying eleven thousand dollars a night made it safely to the elevator, she had a conversation with a friend about a line in a song.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“There’s gotta be something more.”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It doesn’t sound like much. She’ll tell you that herself. But it landed somewhere deep and true, the way certain lines do when you’re ready to hear them whether you know it or not. The big city wasn’t where her heart was. There was no community in it. No personal satisfaction. No sense of helping anyone with anything that actually mattered. She started a graduate degree thinking it would help her figure it out. What it gave her instead was forty thousand dollars in student loans and, as she puts it with the kind of calm that only comes from being completely on the other side of something \u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“a series of shit sandwiches.”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Survival in Chicago wasn’t meeting the mark. She needed her people. She needed her roots. She came home with her family, with her marriage intact, with every intention of building something solid on familiar ground. And for a while, she did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s where I came in. Two working moms, oldest daughters in the same kindergarten class, both of us running the kind of schedule that doesn’t leave much room for anything extra, and yet somehow we found ourselves taking our kids to Zumba classes together. Looking back, we had husbands at home who could have been spending that time with them. We were not thinking clearly. We were also having a great time, which I think cancels it out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Life continued the way life does, layered and loud and full of the kind of ordinary moments that turn out to matter more than you thought. She was finishing her MBA. She was working full time. She was raising her kids. She was doing all of it at once because that was what she was supposed to do, because the pieces of a life she thought she was building looked right from the outside even when something underneath wasn’t quite fitting the pattern. She reflects on those choices now with the particular clarity of a woman who has since learned to ask better questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Had I taken a more rational approach, I would have asked some basic questions. Do I need to do it all at once? Am I selecting a good father to my children, or good sperm?”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Spoiler alert. The marriage didn’t work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I remember her furniture being in the driveway. She laughed. That laugh is important, not because the divorce was easy, it wasn’t, for either of us, and we were navigating it at nearly the same time, two single mothers who ended up living across the creek from each other, which felt less like coincidence and more like the universe deciding we should be within shouting distance. But Marisa laughed because she has always known something that takes most of us years to figure out. That the ending of something isn’t the whole story. That what’s sitting in the driveway is just furniture. That the house is still standing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“The outcome was me.”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

She started living for herself. Her measures of success changed. She didn’t need to run the company anymore. She needed to raise good humans. She needed work that mattered and found it, helping small businesses grow, supporting soldiers, leading with empathy instead of just ambition. And she had her dogs, since she was a child, her one true constant through every version of herself she has ever been, loved across decades, through losses that cracked her open and new ones that stitched her back together. She learned to train them as certified therapy dogs. She started volunteering quietly, doing the kind of philanthropy that doesn’t require an audience or a press release or anyone knowing her name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Philanthropy in its smallest or biggest forms does not require media attention. I’m content being the wallflower that helps, whether the recipient knows or not.”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The hard charging version of her retired gradually. She doesn’t remember any tears being shed over it. The woman who replaced her is a stronger leader, a more empathetic one, someone who has earned her technical knowledge and her pride in equal measure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She built a home, literally and otherwise. She has children who are becoming good humans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And she has her quilts. What I know about a quilt that you can’t learn anywhere else is that it is not just fabric. It is a hug that stays. It is warmth that someone made with their hands specifically for you, that holds you even when they can’t. When Evelyn arrived, the last of my four daughters, Marisa wasn’t at the hospital. But she was there. She had ordered fabric from England, Peter Rabbit printed and soft, something my mother had loved since I was a child, and made it into something Evelyn could be wrapped in from her very first days. Each one of my girls has something made by Marisa’s hands, with pieces of my mother’s nightgowns sewn into the seams. My mother lives in those stitches. My girls carry her without even knowing it yet. That is not a small thing. That is everything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pieces of fabric that don’t look like much on their own, pieces that came from different places, different times, different versions of the pattern she thought she was making. The patience and dedication that have always been hers, steady, quiet, present, holding everything together from underneath, as the backing. The people she chose to invest in, the family she built from various parts of a life fully lived, as the fabric on top. Some pieces didn’t make the final cut. That’s not a tragedy. That’s how quilts work. You take what you have. You figure out what belongs next to what. And then you add the binding, the part that wraps around every raw edge, holds the whole thing together, and finishes what the other pieces started. Every quilt needs one. Every family does too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I am struggling, when the weight of motherhood sits heavy and I can’t find my footing, Marisa reminds me that I am the North Star for my children. That they are always looking for me to find their way. What she has never said out loud, and probably never will, is that she has been the binding all along. For her children. For mine. For everyone who has found their way into her orbit. Holding the edges. Finishing the story. Making the whole thing one cohesive, beautiful thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After I sent her the piece she texted me something I didn’t expect. Quilt lore, she called it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Quilts and textiles are a part of most cultures. Many cultures believe that only God is perfect, so if a mistake is made in the quilt, it’s left there as a reminder of God’s presence. That mistake is a blessing from God and offers protection to those who use it. When I’m making quilts, I always leave my mistakes. I respect that everyone’s God is different, but divine protection is always good. I include this in many of my commissioned quilts. I leave mistakes. They’re beautiful in their own right.”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then, simply \u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I had a bunch of fabrics, there are flaws, but the end state is still a beautiful work of art.”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I sat with that for a long time. Because of course. Of course that’s why the flaws are included. They were never something to fix. They were always something to keep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I asked her what her chapter title would be. She sent me a list. Every single option landed exactly the way she does, funny, honest, and completely unbothered about all of it. And then, among all of them, was the one that stopped me completely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pieces: From Scraps to a Beautiful Masterpiece, Flaws Included.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course it was. Because that’s Marisa. She didn’t just name her chapter. She named it her whole life. The scraps that didn’t look like much. The pattern that didn’t always make sense while she was making it. The flaws she never tried to hide because she always knew they were part of what made it worth keeping.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She made it herself. Every single bit of it. Flaws and all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That was always going to be enough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Marisa is the first subject in the Still Me in Here Portrait Series, black and white photographs of women 40+ paired with the stories that shaped them. You can find her work at @marisasmusequilts on Instagram. Go look. It’s worth every minute. If something in this piece makes something light up in your own chest, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-lately"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stillmeinhere.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stillmeinhere.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stillmeinhere.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stillmeinhere.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stillmeinhere.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=458"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stillmeinhere.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":459,"href":"https:\/\/stillmeinhere.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458\/revisions\/459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stillmeinhere.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stillmeinhere.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stillmeinhere.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}