Patchwork

I am not a seamstress, so these bolts of fabric don’t suggest projects.  I am free to run my hands over them and let my mind wander… this one is as pleasantly pastel as Easter eggs, that one as dark as an oil slick.  I round the aisles slowly, savoring the quiet of the fabric store, silent save for the insistent click of sharp scissors. 

This one is the exact shade of my childhood bedroom, that one soft as my newborn son’s beautiful skin.  He is curled against my chest, his whole body rising and falling with my breath.  I am foggy with lack of sleep and a love so intense it shocks me again and again, and this combination is the only explanation I can offer for my outing this afternoon.  I’m not at all sure why we’re here, but the mismatched bolts of cloth, each neatly wound, then crammed unceremoniously between its neighbors, are somehow soothing.

It has not been an easy month.  It has not been an easy year.  This week marks the first anniversary of a painful miscarriage, as well as my healthy baby’s first month of life.  I’m sure I have no business mourning a lost baby while I hold my son in my arms, while my husband and our daughter play happily at home, so I count my blessings and explain away my weepiness. 

The most convincing explanation is that having two kids, this family that I have desperately wanted, is hard.  Really hard.  The baby is a beautiful little lump and I love him passionately.  He nurses and sleeps the day away; he is easy.  My daughter, who has taught me about this overwhelming motherlove for three years, who so eagerly anticipated this baby, who so sweetly kissed my belly and picked out tiny clothes, is another story.  She does not love being a big sister.  She hits her brother and asks if we have to keep him.  She paints the floor and tears her books and throws her toys.  And I, the one who loves her best of all, am inexcusably angry. 

So we are taking the afternoon off.  She is home with her Daddy, who has untold fonts of patience these days, and I am wandering the fabric store with her baby brother.  A woman squeezes past us in the narrow aisle and coos over the baby.  “Such a blessing,” she smiles at me.  As I come to the back of the little store, I notice three bolts of fabric stacked on the work table, and each conjures up some bit of truth.

The first is smooth and shiny, a silk so perfect it is hard to believe it was woven at all.  This cloth must have simply sprung into existence, just as my love for this little boy has suddenly inserted itself into my life.  It is pure and uncomplicated, a beautifully blank slate.  Loving this silk, like loving this baby, is easy.  It asks nothing of me, presents no imperfections to understand or forgive.  My baby stirs, and I calm him with an effortless sshh, sshh and a gentle bounce.  I meet his every need without thinking; even nursing him in the middle of the night is small effort compared to the challenges of parenting an independent toddler.  But he offers precious little in return; he hasn’t even smiled at me yet.  He is like this silk: all surface; no history, no give and take.  Our relationship is arresting, but somewhat boring and very temporary.  Soon this little lump of a boy will look at me with a personality all his own, and our love will get a little more interesting.

It will begin to look a bit like the second fabric, which I’m sure I’ve seen wrapped around a Guatemalan woman in some National Geographic photograph.  It is brightly colored and imperfectly woven, with little knots here and there.  It is at once improbably smooth and impossibly strong.  In the photograph I’m thinking of, this fabric held a baby safely on his mother’s back, and I too would trust a life to it.  But I don’t think of my baby when I touch this cloth.  No, this one is just like my daughter.  It is tough and vibrant, with a personality and a standard of beauty all its own.  It would be accurate to call this fabric garish, just as it would be right to call my daughter’s tantrums infuriating.  But I love them both, and though it’s hard to remember with crayons flying through the air, I love them all the more for their unappealing qualities, with all the depth and complication and messiness they can offer.

The last bolt is a faint gauze.  It looks substantial, all wound around the cardboard bolt, but as I unroll the fabric it seems to disappear.  It is at once ephemeral and substantial, and it reminds me at once of the baby I lost.  Though I held that baby inside me for just eleven weeks, I’ll hold the idea of that baby forever.  All the women who have miscarried – my friends, my mother’s friends, my grandmother’s friends – have told me this.  The grief will dull, it will grow as thin as this gauze, but it will not go away.  

I buy a yard of each.  They go together in an unexpected way, and for a moment I imagine combining them in a three-baby quilt, but I won’t use them this way.  I won’t ask anything more than what they have already shown me.  At home, and many times in the next few months, I hold them against my cheek and blot the tears of these three distinct loves.  I fold the lengths of fabric carefully and pack them away, a testament to the patchwork quilt of motherhood.