There is a graduation gown on my kitchen table, it weighs 4.2 ounces on my postal scale, and I have been told in writing that it is made from “approximately eleven and a half” recycled plastic bottles — a sentence the school’s parent newsletter presented as a positive.
Ember is graduating pre-K on May 22 from Little Sprouts Forest Academy, which I love and which I pay $940 a month for specifically because they are supposed to know better. The newsletter went out Monday. The gown, per the email, is “sustainably crafted from post-consumer PET,” which is a phrase engineered to make a tired mother nod once and click “yes, I will pay $34.”
I will not be paying $34. PET is polyethylene terephthalate, which I learned about in a Facebook group called “Polyester Is A Petroleum Product And We Were Lied To” (4,217 members, very kind, the admin Cheryl renders her own deodorant from grass-fed tallow and a single juniper berry). Recycled or not, PET sheds microplastic when warm, when rubbed, and — critically — when a five-year-old is sitting under stage lights for forty-seven minutes during a ceremony that, per last year’s program, includes a full slide show of every child holding a different leaf.
My sister-in-law Devon, who works the front desk at a pediatric dentist in Hendersonville and is basically a nurse, told me she has seen, with her own eyes, what polyester does to a child’s skin in late May humidity in this part of North Carolina. She did not elaborate and I did not ask her to. I knew. I think any mother knows.
So I made Ember a graduation gown out of a vintage French linen tablecloth I bought at the Asheville Tailgate Market in 2019 from a woman named Margit who told me, unprompted, that it had “good energy,” and I will tell you — holding this fabric, you feel it. I dyed it the color of unbleached wheat using turmeric, golden raisins, and a single rusted horseshoe per Pinterest. It took six days. I cried twice. It is the most beautiful object I have ever made and it cost me, all in, about $11 in raisins.
I sent one photo to the class group chat. I want to be very clear about my conduct here: I did not lecture, I did not link a single article, I simply wrote “Made Ember’s gown from a tablecloth — happy to walk anyone through it 🌾.” I included the wheat emoji because I have media training.
Within four hours, the PTA had convened what is technically named the “Ad Hoc Working Group on Graduation Cohesion,” which is three women including a mother named Tabitha who runs the laminator and once told me that beeswax wraps are “a phase.” The working group’s draft proposal is that all graduates be required to wear matching purchased gowns “for photographic continuity.” I have been informed, in writing, that I am for now “an outlier the group is monitoring.”
I have also been informed, separately and in private, that three other mothers want in. Solène’s daughter Wren is going to wear a gown sewn from her grandmother’s 1962 wedding curtains. June is hand-dyeing organic muslin with avocado pits in her garage as we speak. A fourth mother, who asked me not to name her because her husband is “complicated about turmeric,” has requested my tablecloth pattern and offered to trade me a dozen duck eggs and a jar of fermented honey.
My husband Jasper said, gently, over our morning matcha, that I might be turning a kindergarten ceremony into a referendum. I told him a referendum is exactly what graduation is. We are saying: this child made it, and we are willing to dress them in the consequences of that.
Ceremony is in fifteen days. The gown is hanging in the south-facing window, airing out the last of the turmeric. Ember tried it on yesterday and twirled once and said it smelled like soup, which I am taking as a yes.