In Short – Issue 2 (Winter 2025)

January 31, 2025

Photo courtesy of the author

What We Wore Together

By Kyoko Mori

In a black-and-white photograph from the early 1960s in Kobe, Japan, my mother and I stand on a hill, halfway up to the park at its top. Although I don’t remember the pleated jumper skirt I wore, I know my mother made it because, throughout my childhood, she sewed other skirts, some in this same style. The white blouse with the huge fan-shaped collar came from the children’s boutique she took me to every month. Shopping for clothes and visiting fabric stores for bolts of cotton, linen, silk, and velvet were our favorite pastimes. My mother knew how to cut her own patterns and make one-of-a-kind outfits for us.

In the photograph, she poses behind me in a white blouse with a small square collar, a white cardigan, and a dark jumper skirt—an adult’s version with a complete front, instead of suspenders like mine. Our clothes never matched, exactly. My mother did not want me to look like a miniature copy of herself: the moment I was born, I became my own separate person. But our outfits were similar enough so anyone could see that we were a pair, we belonged to each other. 

In the photo, taken by one of my uncles who accompanied us, I’m three or four; she’s just past thirty. Neither of us knows that we are already a quarter of the way through our time together.   Her thumb and index finger circle my wrist; hers is inside the circular handles of a bag she sewed and embroidered. She later made bags like this for me, one for each lesson I took—piano, dance, water color—with musical notes, little ballerinas, and paint brushes embroidered next to my name. She didn’t expect me to become a pianist, dancer, or painter. What mattered was the rigorous discipline required by each art form. Someday, she said, I would find my own pursuit of beauty.  

Years later at college in Rockford, Illinois, the plastic bangle bracelets I wore to dorm parties would remind me of the handles of those bags I carried to my lessons: soft and hard at once, like milk candy. I would remember not the early childhood skirt from the photograph but the last one my mother tried to sew for me from another checkered material, a plaid pattern with dark blue and black lines intersecting diagonally like shadows underwater. 

The hardest part of sewing is cutting into the cloth, separating the pattern from the scraps to discard. The act is irreversible, like writing the farewell letters to her parents, to her brothers and sisters, to her husband, and to me, before sealing the windows shut and turning on the gas. My mother left the pieces pinned to her sewing board for my aunt to finish: a knee-length A-line skirt to start my seventh-grade wardrobe. The private school she chose for me to attend, an all-girls’ academy, had junior and senior high schools and college on the same campus. Enrolling me in this academy, known for its arts and bilingual education, was one of her final acts. It was the only way she could ensure I had a path different from hers. I transferred to an American college at twenty and never returned to my father’s and stepmother’s house. 

In Rockford, at the mall where I picked up my senior portrait, I bought a prairie skirt in the same blue-and-black plaid, but with a gold thread running through the dark squares. By then, I understood that my mother had been at once wrong and right when she thought she was freeing me from her unhappiness by killing herself. I was moving to another American city in a month to start my graduate studies in writing. If my mother had been alive, I would never have left Kobe even if she had begged me to, both of us knowing that she could not protect me from whatever marriage my father’s family decided to arrange for me. All my childhood friends were already engaged to younger versions of our fathers. Soon, they would send me nearly identical photographs from their wedding: in a multilayered bridal kimono for the ceremony, a white satin gown for the reception, and for the grand exit, a traveling dress like Jackie Kennedy’s from fifteen years prior. The wedding marked the last occasion on which my friends were the main character of their story, standing side-by-side with the groom, seemingly his equal.

The prairie skirt became a staple of my graduate school wardrobe, worn with a leotard to remind myself of the dance lessons my mother sent me to. The small steps and gestures practiced over and over could cohere into a movement that seemed natural, even inevitable. Each lesson had been about commitment and persistence, but hope played a part, too. My mother had done everything she could to launch me into the future she couldn’t wait for. A daughter is a daughter always, forever loved. I couldn’t change the past, but the clothes we wore together would return decade after decade, their styles slightly altered but essentially the same, allowing me to be a reincarnation of who I used to be with her.

Kyoko Mori's most recent nonfiction book, Cat and Bird: A Memoir, was published by Belt Publishing in March 2024. She is the author of three other nonfiction books and four novels. Kyoko Mori teaches creative writing at George Mason University and the Low-Residency MFA Program at Lesley University. She lives in Washington DC with her cats, Miles and Jackson.