Blankets, love and broken things
Triumph over childhood adversity through the medium of fibre art
Childhood blankets
We all have a blanket that we bring with us from childhood, metaphorical or real. This is a story about those blankets and what they have meant in my life. It is also the history of my friend’s childhood blanket, the only thing her birth mother ever gave her, that she carried with her through foster home after foster home until it was warped and threadbare and ready to fall apart. It’s the story of how love, so often, is not dramatic or passionate or enormous, but quiet, compassionate presence, work, clever hands, trust, craft and friendship, and it is the story of how blankets, hearts and broken things, can be mended and remade.
Fabric, adversity and trauma
Everybody, I firmly believe, has a childhood blanket. Most of us have an actual blanket still with us, but all of us have a metaphorical one. There are all kinds of blankets. Rich, red, gold brocade, a double bedspread that’s large enough to keep you warm for ever. A scruffy, handknitted little thing, made of odds and ends and love. A standard, square cornered hospital issue one; functional, but bland and drafty.
Adversity can pull at the weft and weave of any blanket, pull it out of shape, pull a few threads loose, but most people can manage this. Sew in the loose threads. Some people, with clever hands, quick wit, and warm hearts, can use their skills to use those loose threads to embroider their blanket, make it more beautiful, more impressive, more meaningful. A triumph of colour, sewn from the loose threads adversity pulled out, which otherwise may never have been revealed.
Trauma, though, trauma cuts. It tears weft from weave. It renders threads asunder. It drags the blanket through fire, and through the dirt, until all you have left is a pile of broken yarn that you can’t even begin to mend without skills, without help, without time, and more tools, and more threads, not your own, to hold the broken ones together.
Fighting it alone
And when you try to fix the tangled pile, you find that the thing that did the cutting is still in there, and now you’re bleeding, and in knots, and the whole thing is worse than when you started, and everything feels hopeless and impossible, and you have to get up, get up another day and just face that knotted pile of broken threads, full of razors and caked in blood, and work out how to carry on. I walked that path. I know what it is to live without love, and without hope. I knew what task I had to do, if I was ever to find myself again, in those tattered remains. I knew what was to be done, even though it took me many years to find the courage to begin.
The courage to begin
In the end, I had to start. So I learned how to wash and card fleece. I found that the lanolin from the fleece was a balm to my cracked hands. I started to feel a little better almost immediately. I learned how to spin and weave and knit. I learned how to form broken strands into yarn, and yarn into fabric, and it took me years before I got the courage to go back to the tangled fibres, what was left of my childhood blanket. But I did go back, in fear and trembling.
And when I got there, with my newly carded and spun yarn, and my tools, and the fibre art my clever hands had made, and my fingers that had learned to be clever through many hours of patient work, I found that it was possible to parse the broken threads, and weave them into my work. Difficult, time consuming, a labour of love, requiring everything that I had emotionally, but it was possible. And here’s the thing. When I stopped, and looked, I realised that I had woven the broken, tattered threads into something new.
Something new
It was not my childhood blanket any more. Who would want that threadbare old thing when they could have this absolute riot of colour and love and joy, this bitter sweet tapestry, this triumph, created with my own hands, against all the odds? Who would cling to those tattered threads, when they could have this painting in yarn, this thing, rich and alive with colour and work and experience and pain and richness and depth, and big enough to keep me warm? Who would cling to a relic, a remnant, who would want that cold comfort, when they could have a blanket so soft that it felt like an embrace, and big enough to wrap around my children, and if the goddess is kind, their children too?
So now I use my clever hands to make a blanket for every baby born in my huge, adopted, Irish family, and with luck, those threads will not be torn asunder. And if they are, I know, I can’t really rescue anybody, I can’t lead anybody out of the darkness. We all have to face our own broken threads, alone, in the end. But I can lend my tools, and teach the skill to use them. I can tell you how I rescued myself, how I broke the curse with my own hands, and I can tell you that I’ve a hell of a blanket that you can shelter under, until you find your own way out of the darkness.
And it’s a metaphor, but it’s not too.
Chloe
My friend Chloe (not her real name), had a baby blanket. The only thing her mother had ever given her, she crocheted it before Chloe was born from scraps left over from other blankets. Chloe carried it through foster homes and group homes and all through her traumatic childhood and her chaotic early adulthood, and when she showed it to me, she was 40, and it was literally falling to pieces.
She knew that I have some skills in the fibre arts, she knew what I had taught my clever hands to do, and she knew what deep meaning the work of women’s hands has for me, and she knew that I understand something of what it’s like to experience trauma, and survive, and (and every time I think of this I get a lump in my throat), she asked me to restore her blanket for her. I told her then, and I’ll tell you now, I regard that as one of the highest honours and greatest trusts that has been bestowed on me in my whole life. I know the meaning of that request. I hesitated, it was a huge blanket, a huge responsibility and a very difficult and time consuming job, but I knew I had to do it. I had to restore the thing to as much of its former glory as I could, whilst preserving as much of the original as possible.
A labour of love
I took the whole thing apart, removed all the cream yarn and the borders, and replaced a bunch of the fraying green as well. Then I put it back in a slightly different order, to put the stretched corner pieces closer to the centre and preserve the rectangular shape. I thought of Chloe’s mother as I did it, and did my best to honour her work. The blanket represented a loving thing that she had done for her daughter, and despite everything that happened afterwards, it was still an act of love, love made into fibre, and I did my best to honour that, and to wrap the threads up in love of my own as well.
I put the blanket back together again and crocheted in a border, as close to the original as I could. Chloe doesn’t cry, or talk about feelings, not much, “she’s lived some life/ you’d never choose,” but there were tears in her eyes when I gave her the finished work, and I could see that she was choking her “thank you” past the lump in her throat, and she told me later on a message that she could now put it over the back of her chair, and let her children play with it. Her threadbare childhood blanket was too fragile even to take out of its box, but now her children can play with it.
The work of women
Repair work on childhood blankets is difficult, precarious, fraught with risk. It is a labour of love, and requires the quiet work of the hands, patience, skill. It requires courage, too, and diligence, and that old fashioned value of contentiousness. Perhaps for these reasons, it is, in my experience, the work almost exclusively of women. Women who gather up the broken threads, women whose clever hands make things anew. Women whose labour goes unseen, and will not change the world for everybody, but will change the whole world for everybody who loves them. In the company of those mighty women, “I shall not now feel ashamed.”
For my own reasons, I cried reading this. All I have of my daughter, who died at three days old, is the hospital mitten I took from her forty years ago, so that I could hold her hand at the end. What you are doing is such a pure expression of love. I wish you well in all that you do. 🙏
That’s beautiful!