She Still Sleeps in a Crib

I didn't plan to write about motherhood for Mother's Day, bit it was the thing I needed to say.

I love to write from the images I’ve created. For me, the image is not complete with the close of the shutter. The process of care continues into the after many times over. One of those ways is to revisit and write from them. I consider them my most favorite prompts.

Today’s image sparked something I wanted to follow, so I did. I didn’t know I’d be writing about quilts or motherhood, but I love what poured out.

These posts are excersisces in remembering my time spent pumping for my youngest and fifth child Edna (2022-2023). They are free and delivered to your inbox each Sunday morning. If you don’t yet receive them and would like to receive more of the same:

---

I don’t remember so much of that year. The pictures help. Combing the archive today led me to this moment - one I can’t recall but remember so many like it. Silly faces, joyful laughs. Something in it made me want to write. I followed that spark. I love where it led.

We lay in bed this morning. She’s a month shy of being four. She rolls to her left so we can spoon perfectly, her head beneath my chin. I wedge her ice cold feet between my warm thighs. I hold her hands and kiss her cheeks.

When she was small and would fuss I would stand her up in the corner of my hips. Head resting on her arms she would look out the window and fall quiet.

I see this picture and wonder, how did she fit on my hip like that? These days her legs drag down, her feet meeting my knees. We walk down the stairs wishing goodnight to all the things; goodnight painting of fields in Italy, goodnight front door and entry table covered in unopened mail, goodnight tree with leaves that are dying, goodnight to us reflected in the tall window of night, goodnight sisters and brothers already tucked in, goodnight piano, goodnight sauna, goodnight Edna all tucked in with a handmade quilt.

Edna has three handmade quilts. The first was made by a best friend’s mother-in-law. It came from a room filled to the brim with cotton quilting fabrics from every color of the rainbow, two sewing machines, and rows and rows of thread. It made me sneeze from all the fluff. I wanted to run my fingers along all it’s soft edges.

It is red and white and machine stitched. I lay that red on the floor at my feet while I pumped. I dreamed of being able to dive in and disappear in that red. A wonderful vortex that would carry me away, but it was just a quilt to lay my baby on and make pretty photos with. It is a hallmark of 3600 Hours.

The second quilt is the one I tuck her in under. This one is bright and made of soft flannel. Lace trims it’s edges and it is tied not stitched. In my maternal extended family the women of the Brown family would gather around a quilt and tie. They take yards of yarn, thread it through the needle and sew it through marked dots about four inches apart. When the yarn runs out they cut the long threads and tie them in a square knot. They did it at my bridal shower. They did it to sell to keep the family home. They did it to gift to those in need.

Edna’s tied quilt is extra special. It came from my great-aunt Georgie. My mother’s only grandmother figure. Twenty years my grandpa’s older sister she treated my mother as if she was her granddaughter more than her niece. Aunt Georgie was everyone’s grandmother. Mine too. I loved the dresser in her front room filled with fabric. Long silky bits she’d give me to dress up in. Small cotton bits she’d use to make underwear for the barbies. And much much larger bits she would magic into beautiful warm things that kept you safe. My mother purchased this last quilt of Aunt Georgie’s. Georgie had passed away the year before. The family retroactively offered her final quilts to auction off and pay for the familial home in Panguitch Utah.

Edna’s last quilt seems to reappear at the strangest times. It’s the only quilt I’ve ever made. It is alternating strips of pale pink and white. The pink strips are made from many different pieces of pink fabric I cut to size and sewed together. I laid those between white strips to form the quilt top. I machine stitched the top with a special freeform quilting foot I attached to the Bernina sewing machine I’d stolen from my mother. I bound the edges in pink by hand. I’ve never made another quilt.

This quilt seems to come and remind me of all the ways I thought I would be a mother and all the ways I am actually a mother. When I made that quilt I thought I would make one for each of my children, but instead I learned I hated making quilts.

I thought I would make hot meals, and powder their faces after their baths each night. I thought I would tie their shoes for them until they could on their own. I thought I would treasure all those small beautiful things that happen when they are perfect and small.

Those are silly painted pictures I’d dreamed in my wistfully naive ever nesting pregnant 24 year old self. Bath/bedtime when the two or three or then four of them were small was wartime. It was a manufactured brilliant display of industrialism. It was start the water, undress one, put them in, times four. Then it was wash hair for one times four, then bums and hands and cheeks. Then out and dry one by one with most likely the same towel. Then pure chaos while chasing children, diapers, underwear, and pajamas from all the places those were kept and one by one into bed for everyone, 5 and under.

Still, there were four little red heads all lined up in that tub. So much white skin against the blue 1950s tub. I’d rest my head on my hand and watch them play with rags like fish - just like my sister and I did. I held their tiny hands and washed between their toes. We sang silly songs and I wished it could always be this way.

All these things sewn into a little pink quilt I can’t ever give away and won’t ever make again.

---

Falling softly through my photo archives.

Collecting them into cohesion

Putting words beside them

for the making of a book