Rags to Stitches
By Natasha Steer
@natasha.steer
I settle on the porch of the cottage my mother and I rented for the week and look out at the deck that stretches in front of me and into the water. I sip my tea, raise my book, and pause.
I notice my mother sitting in a white plastic chair in front of the lake, with her morning coffee on the small table beside her. I’m surprised to see her so relaxed. I’d wondered if cottage life would be too slow for her, but it seems she’s settled into the peacefulness of it all.
She looks down at something in her lap, makes adjustments to something I can’t see, and then places an indistinguishable shape on the table beside her cup of coffee. She gets up and wanders around. She is looking for something—peering at the ground—and I am amused. Of course she is creating something, even now, even here, without any of her usual materials.
She finds what she is looking for, returns to her seat, and continues with whatever it is she’s creating. I watch from behind, curious and touched by this characteristic moment I observe while she is unaware, believing she is alone in nature and her art. She stops what she’s doing, and reaches out to place her creation on the table. Twisted from brown wire is the outline of a person, sitting on a rock.
I marvel at my mother. She always finds a way to create. And yet, I did not have a particularly creative childhood.
I asked her about this once, after she told me a story of a rug hooking course she took with her mum and sister when she was in high school. She grew up creating art alongside her mother and a heavy ache always expands in my chest—filling it with envy and longing—each time I remember that I did not.
Maybe I’m forgetting something from when I was small. Maybe we’d done a project together that had fled my memory, too long ago to access.
“We didn’t do a lot together because I was always working,” she told me.
I nod. I already knew this. Why did I even ask her this question?
I was raised in Canada by my single mother who, despite her efforts, did not receive child support. One job never paid enough, and it was not unusual for my mother to work five jobs at once.
Her work encircled my upbringing. Instead of rug hooking, painting, or cooking, my mother and I spent time together at her work places. I’d play hide and seek in the storage room while she worked at a desk job or amuse myself in the daycare room at the gym where she worked as a receptionist. When I was older, I wandered the malls and flea markets, enjoying the atmosphere and killing time until her shift was over. Sometimes, I’d help her work, chatting with customers or demonstrating a product she was selling.
I loved my childhood. In many ways, it was immersed in my mother’s work, but I didn’t know any different, and I certainly didn’t mind. It was interesting. She was always doing something new, and I grew up watching my mother work hard.
Still, that work was a necessary responsibility that, alongside home renovations and parenting responsibilities, took up huge chunks of my mother’s time. Work that was the least creative part of her life, a far cry from the flower shop she had once planned to open on the Danforth in Toronto.
Though my mother sometimes managed to find ways to be creative—the small yellow dress she sewed for me when I was a baby or the ceramic beige floor tiles she carefully chose and laid down in our kitchen—opportunities for creativity largely evaporated when she became the lone adult in the home—the one in charge of everything.
The reality of being the sole financial and emotional supporter for a child while navigating systemic issues that place the burden of receiving any child support on the parent is hard, exhausting, and consuming work.
My mother carried this burden. She provided everything for me, and she prioritized me at the expense of her own creative and emotional wellbeing.
Her story is similar to my own story of motherhood.
I gave birth at 19, and wrapped my entire adult life around my son’s well being. It wasn’t until recently that he began to seek more space and independence.
So, as I consider my mother’s reignited creativity, I decide to take my own newfound time and reinvest it into myself. Into creating.
I decide to take a month-long quilt making course, so I can finish a creative project I began years ago: a quilt of clothing from my son’s childhood.
In week one, I am simply excited to begin. I set up beside my mother’s sewing machine in my childhood home. I’m buzzing with excitement, giddy with the luxury of it all.
By week two, my excitement shifts toward the quilt itself. I’m delighted that my son will be able to tangibly hold pieces of his childhood in his hands one day.
By week three, the excitement has worn off. More dishevelled and with my bun messier than usual, I am surrounded by too many colourful squares of material. On the table, on the floor, hanging off of every available chair, my unmade quilt surrounds me. It taunts me.
I tug with frustration at the material, trying to align the squares perfectly, and fight with the sewing machine each time the fabric gets stuck. But my mother is there—her voice more gentle and patient than usual—and she talks me back from the ledge over and over. She tells me I won’t notice the imperfections once it’s done, removes the stitches when I need to re-sew something, and puts the pins on the other side so they’re easier to take out as I go. Her hands move deftly over the fabric, and my mother endures my never-ending questions: “How do you know?” and “Why can’t I do that?”
I am slow, frustrated, envious, and resentful. Learning to quilt in your thirties is much harder than doing so as a young child. I can’t help but wish I was sewing doll clothes at the age of 12 like my mother, when her mum taught her.
And yet, I am also grateful, tentatively proud, and brimming with a warm glow. So this is what it feels like to create with my mother.
By the end of the 4-week course, I have a few sewn-together scraps.
I did not share a creative childhood with my mother.
But maybe, I can learn from her now. Maybe, I can share a creative adulthood with her.
So, we continue to take the colorful pieces of my son’s childhood in our hands, and each time she hears the desperation in my voice when I can’t get it right, she says, “It’s okay. You do it like this.” And then we work through it, together.
Guest essay written by Natasha Steer. Natasha is a social justice educator who lives with her son in the Greater Toronto Area. She became a single-lone mother at the age of 19 and has traveled to over 50 countries with her teenage son. Empowering students by day and writing by night, Natasha has a BA in English Literature and an MEd in Social Justice Education. You can find her online on her website.