Tender Edge
Charlie is enamored with textures. He is almost eleven months old and is finding his way through the world by touch. From what I can tell, there is nothing solely cerebral, no “thinking”, only tactility. He is always touching things with his small pudgy fingers and if he can, putting them in his mouth. If he can’t, slowly lowers his face to the thing, mouth open, to cover it in a sloppy kiss. A friend of mine says to him “That’s how you explore the world”.
His favorite books are books with textures, cut outs, or flaps. We have four in our collection: The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Pat the Bunny, Where’s Spot, and Llama Llama Hide and Seek (beginning with my favorite line “Llama Llama Red Pajama cannot find his fuzzy llama”).
Around five months, Charlie began teething, and now has six very sharp teeth and a seventh white nub. In what I assume is a natural way to address the discomfort of teething, he bites down on textures, fabric mostly, and drags it forward through his teeth. Our house is spotted with worn down edges—the Velcro tab of his changing pad, tags on his clothing, the fuzzy blanket we throw over him in his car seat, his cotton pacifier clip. He does the same type of biting and pulling when I wear textured sweaters, biting and gnawing at my shoulders when I hold him on my hip.
I inherited a quilt from my mother, made by her grandmother. The quilt is made of hundreds of hexagons, and from what I know of the pattern, is likely hand stitched. The hexagon pattern is known by different names, “honeycomb”, “rosette”, “mosaic”, “grandmother’s flower garden”, the lattermost like the one from my great grandmother, in which the hexagons are arranged in small clusters that resemble flowers. It’s masterfully pieced, twin sized, made of small hexagons about an inch and a half in diameter. My mother had the quilt on her bed throughout her childhood. She tells me that she would lay belly down on it and stare into it, tracing the puckered seams with her fingers.
She has similar habits now, too. When I sit next to her, she traces circles with her thumb on the soft skin of my wrist. When she drives in the car, she gently brushes her thumbs back and forth across the steering wheel.
This past fall my mom would take care of Charlie at her house while I was teaching. Sometimes when I arrived to pick Charlie up, he would still be taking his afternoon nap. We arranged a small sleeping space for him in her walk-in-closet, one that was dark and quiet. Sometimes when I walked in to get Charlie, I would see that my mom had given him something soft or smooth, a silk scarf, or soft camisole, edged with lace, draped over Charlie’s chest, across his cheek, or clutched tight in his little hand. One day she sent a small blue scarf home with him, saying "I just think he should have something soft to hold onto". She has always been a big believer in textures.
In a work in 2001, titled face to face, the artist Ann Hamilton devised a way of making pinhole cameras small enough to fit in her mouth, “my mouth shall become my eye”. When she opened her mouth, the film would be exposed and take a picture. The images that were produced look caught in mid-movement. The black vignette that frames the edges are in a compressed hexagon shape, a shape formed by the outline of her mouth. In talking about the work she said “to invert the location of one sense to another part of the body, those kind of dislocations or slippages, is then, one way we come to see something differently”.
This summer I made a quilt from a pattern created by the quilter Heidi Parkes. The structure was in the form of a daily practice, with instructions to complete a portion of the quilt each day. I began it in early summer, when Charlie was a newborn. At the time that I made it, it felt necessary, and as I look at it now, it is a striking, precious portrait of our early days together learning how to be mother and son. It has all sorts of appliqué, embroidery, and quilting stitches. I have it lying on the floor of his bedroom like a play mat. I was delighted when Charlie noticed it, crawling to find, touch, (and mouth) the yo-yo’s, puffed trapunto, dotted stitches, and tassel ties.
In a birthing class before Charlie was born, I was advised to prepare ways for myself to tap into different sensory experiences while I was in labor. My impression of the strategy concerned the idea of pain thresholds, and that when in pain, our bodies can take in only a certain amount of sensation. To meet the pains of childbirth, I was encouraged to bring in a lavender sachet to smell, a playlist to listen to, candy to suck on, or an important picture to look at, and have my birthing partner rub my back or apply pressure to my hips.
The strategies reminded me of a common grounding technique to offset panic or anxiety, which is to name our sensory connections—what do we see, hear, feel, smell, taste. The birthing strategies helped, but what I remember most vividly in the dark hours of the hospital room, as my son and I struggled together through the final pains of labor, was the sound of my mom's voice reading me scripture and the softness of her hand, gripped tightly in mine.
See face to face, by Ann Hamilton, and hear her talk about the work in "Art 21, Spirituality"
Check out Story Quilt Top: A Daily Practice in Hand Stitching, Heidi Parkes