Awake Under the Quilt

Good morning, it’s 3:30am.

In my dreams, I’m flying. I’ve never had flying dreams before. My dreams are more vivid than I’ve ever experienced. Then I’m slammed into wakefulness. Alert, my body flooded with cortisol. Welcome to menopause. It’s 3:30am again.

I fall asleep easily for the first time in my life. I have hormone replacement therapy to thank for that. But even at the highest doses, my sleep is fractured. I feel like an infant again. My body doesn’t acknowledge the rules of when to sleep anymore. My ability to sleep through the night shattered into pieces. I’m trying to stitch them together, piece them into a sensible pattern, just like the quilt I’m trying to sleep beneath.

My youngest child is going through a transition too. The entrance into adolescence. We are doing this together. How is it that these shifts come like a switch that is flipped. Childhood to adolescence, adulthood to… what? Old age? Whatever it is, both of these are irreversible conditions. Each of us have had to face something we aren’t excited about. Adulthood. Mortality.

I’m watching this boy become something different. Deep thoughts, and existential insights. Will I lose these as I come closer to my own finitude? Will my middle age weaken this link to the existential, to infinity? I think my kid feels this same loss. The way that childhood feels endless. Days haven’t become Mondays and Tuesdays yet. Months and years pass by with small punctuations. Birthday candles and Christmas trees. Magic, not calendars.

We have both approached this era with anxiety and insomnia. Is it my hormones or my psyche? The ambiguity, another frustration.

I’m thankful for quilts these days. They have come to me during the last few years. I always thought of them as artifacts of grandmothers. I am the age that I could be a grandmother now. I’m only 50, but not impossibly far from that role. I used to shy away from them for that reason. Now I understand something they have to offer.

It feels fitting that during a period where I feel fragmented, I am drawn to an art built from fragments. I have always thought it was funny that quilters cut up perfectly good fabric just to sew it back together again.

While I sew these pieces together, I feel the quilt sewing me up too. The scraps and remnants begin to feel strangely metaphorical. Inherited fabrics. Carefully chosen hand-dyed pieces. I’m rearranging myself from these fragments.

My child is going through the same rearranging, also using fabric. He told me a year ago that he liked colors. He wanted to find clothes that were full of color. He asked me to dye his hair bright blue, then later to add all kinds of different colors. He wears red pants, bright checkered shirts. Every day he constructs his own self through fabric and color. Just like me. He is in pieces too, stitching himself together into something. Never quite whole, but he has a vision.

Before either of us can explain what is happening to us, we reach for cloth. Color. Texture. Arrangement. We start making ourselves visible before we can fully make ourselves understood. The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan said that textiles were the first text. I see both this boy and I using textiles to write the first text of our new eras. We don’t know how to talk about it yet. We don’t understand our own undoing and redoing. We feel what is being lost and what is at stake.

This is why I so often return to psychoanalysis in my writing. The quilts come first. The color comes first. The body comes first. The theory arrives later as an attempt to speak what was already being worked out through cloth.

These objects give us a way to begin talking about these transitions. They are not just self-expression, but material tools for metabolizing bodily transformation. Textiles help us articulate that before language catches up.

I loved watching each of my kids use fashion to express this inexpressible experience. They have both used fashion as experimentation, sometimes protection, armor, social language. These transitions can be experienced as estrangement from our own bodies. Sometimes even a kind of dysmorphia, where we hate the skin we are in. And it’s not only our outsides that are transformed. It’s the very chemical makeup of ourselves.

What moves me is not that my children have discovered who they are, but that they engage so actively in the impossible labor of becoming. They resist the temptation to retreat from ambiguity. They tolerate the frustration of never fully expressing what is happening to them. There is something deeply human in that effort itself. Perhaps this is what I fear most about aging: not mortality exactly, but crystallization. The hardening of the self into something finished. My children remind me that subjectivity is not something achieved once and for all, but something continuously pulled from fragments, revised, stitched together again.

Cloth comes to our rescue again and again. It is a building block, a matrix of creativity. Teenagers are drawn to the aesthetic language of fashion to build a self before they can fully explain themselves. I feel the same tendency this year with my own clothes. I find myself shopping for clothes for the first time in years. I’ve been buying accessories and makeup. Enjoying this same form of self expression as they do.

My child and I are going through this switch together, at opposite ends of the thread. We both have to stare into the existential gloom of it all. This has been an incredibly destabilizing experience for both of us. It’s hard to go through a time where who we are is not stable. I’m not sure what has disappeared and what has remained. What is new and what is old.

He is graduating from middle school in a few days and I’m helping him redesign his room. I asked him what was important for him and he told me that he still wanted to be able to build forts. There are few weeks that go by that I don’t wonder where all the quilts have disappeared to only to find them gathered in his room, strung together with a series of ropes. Quilt forts. I’m glad he will take these with him. I love that we both like to build these worlds, even if temporary, from the quilts.