Morgan Patterson

The Thread I Couldn't See Until I Looked Back

I had a childhood some would like to forget. I mostly did, for a long time.

What I remember instead is a small church I walked to by myself every Sunday, where the air smelled like candle wax, and I would sit in the last pew and watch colored light spill across the floor through the stained-glass windows. I didn't have words yet for what I was looking for there. I just knew that little church was where I could breathe.

I didn't understand until I was forty years old why that church had mattered so much. A memory came back—one quiet image, not a flood—and it was enough to tell me the little girl in that pew had been carrying something no child should have to carry.

I won't spend this article there.

But I won't pretend it isn't the first thread, either, because it is.

A Compass Pointed at Other People's Hardest Moments

What that childhood gave me, strangely, was a compass.

I spent the next thirty-five years pointed straight at other people's most vulnerable moments—as an ER nurse, a Life Flight paramedic, a hospice nurse, and eventually a Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner, sitting beside women whose lives had changed in a single hour.

I didn't always have the right words. Most of the time, there weren't any.

What I learned to offer instead was presence—staying when staying was the only thing I had left to give.

At sixty, I walked five hundred miles across Spain on the Camino de Santiago.

Somewhere along that trail, on a mountainside with no tree, no rock, nothing to hide behind, I had to relieve myself in the open—and a family of five came around the bend at exactly the wrong moment.

It was funny, eventually.

In the moment, it wasn't.

For just a second, I wasn't a nurse, a minister, or a sixty-year-old pilgrim.

I was that little girl again, wishing there were somewhere safe to go.

A Question I Couldn't Put Down

I came home with a question I couldn't put down:

Why do women simply accept that feeling—that exposure, that vulnerability—as the cost of loving the outdoors?

I didn't act on it right away.

Instead, I spent the next five years building CNA programs in two county high schools, teaching a new generation the same work that had shaped me.

I retired at sixty-five.

Three years later, at sixty-eight, the question returned on its own, fully formed. I sat down at my dining room table with a pair of scissors and started cutting up skorts.

I had never designed a piece of clothing in my life.

It took a mentor, much later, to help me see what I couldn't see while I was living it.

During a leadership training, she listened to my whole story—the church, the breath, the nursing, the Camino, the invention—and she didn't respond to any one chapter.

She responded to the shape of the whole story.

What I had always experienced as separate, disconnected pieces of a life, she saw as one continuous thread: a little girl searching for safety, who grew into a woman who learned to sit with other people's vulnerability, and who finally built something that gives a small piece of that safety back.

What the Stealth Skort Really Is

That's what the Stealth Skort really is, underneath the fabric and the patent.

It's a way of saying that no woman should have to choose between being outdoors and being exposed.

And it's why, when we built Cover Yer Assets, we didn't stop with the garment. Ten percent of every dollar goes toward helping women around the world gain access to clean water and safe restroom facilities—the most basic form of dignity there is, and one I had the privilege of taking for granted for much of my life without fully realizing it.

I don't think I set out to build any of this.

I think I spent more than seventy years being quietly prepared for it, one ordinary Tuesday and one difficult room at a time.

If there's a thread running through your life, too—the one that keeps showing up wearing a different costume every ten years—my only advice is this:

Don't give up on it too soon.

Some parts of your story won't make sense until you've stepped back far enough to see the entire weave.

Rev. K. Morgan Patterson is the founder of Cover Yer Assets, a women's outdoor apparel brand, and the creator of the Everyday Pilgrim community. A retired ER nurse and ordained minister, she invented the Stealth Skort at age 68 with no prior design or manufacturing experience.