Crafting: a life

Before I was born, my mother and grandmother created a christening outfit for me. Mom cut and sewed and stitched all summer long when she wasn't busy working as an au pair in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Grandma tatted lace in a tiny village in rural New York. With the work of their hands, together in creation but apart in location, they bound their love into fabric and turned it into art for a child they'd never seen and couldn't keep. The adoption agency wouldn't let them give it to me. It was the 60s, and anything gifted from the birth mother might "weaken" the bond of the child with its new parents. As if she hadn't already given them the greatest gift imaginable. She had four days before they took me away and she returned to school.

My Mom cut and pieced and sewed clothes and stuffed animals for me and later for my brother, when we adopted him two years later. My Dad created toys, furniture, and jungle gyms out of wood. We grew up playing with scraps of fabric and wood--and making tents and fortresses for dolls and action figures--wild landscapes of plaid, checked, striped, or spotted terrain for Matchbox cars to drive over and around. Crafting--a gift from my birthmom--was nurtured by my Mom, just as she and Dad nurtured my brother and me.

Mom taught me to knit and Dad to work with wood, though as a child I was too impatient to ever finish anything. It wasn't until I was an adult myself that I picked it up again--to knit for my babies, friends, and family or make a bookcase or toybox for our home. Knitting, sewing, and woodworking are soothing to me--moving meditations replete with sensory satisfaction. I am by no means an expert at any of them (though mitering corners is pretty much the same, regardless of material). My enjoyment in creation and the recipient's enjoyment of what I make does not require perfection, though I strive to improve.

It wasn't until my third daughter was born that we had the time and money to search for my birthmom and birthdad. It wasn't out of any sense of need. I wanted, more than anything, to say "thank you." My family--the family that my birthmom gave to me--is amazing. I have parents who were ready and longed to love and nurture children of their own. They did everything they could to enrich our lives, teach us, and give us the world. I wanted my birthmom and birthdad to know how happy I was.

No adoptee is ever entirely ready to meet their birth family. Everyone is nervous and slightly wary. Of course I had my knitting in my hands to keep me from fidgeting. I learned that Mom crochets but that her quilts and clothes are her true works of art--gracing the beds of every room in the very same house where Grandma tatted the lace for my christening. Mom, like her mother before her, is an expert seamstress--creating beautifully draped clothing--including my half-sister's wedding dress. I learned that Dad crafts mostly in his Kentucky kitchen, where his copper-bottomed pots shine among the sharpest knives and scissors I've ever seen--or in the wine cellar where he aged my very own cask of wine for me before helping me bottle it the year after I met him. I also learned that my love of words and dictionaries is definitely a gift from my birthmom's side. My love of terrible puns and wordplay, she blames on my birthdad, but her father was equally fond of them, so who knows who's to blame for that.

I recognize now that creativity takes many forms and that nurture guides those creative urges and helps them blossom. Without Mom and Dad's own talent and support, my own gifts might never have been recognized or developed.

As for my christening outfit, my aunt found it when she helped clean out my grandparents' attic. She had it cleaned and repaired and she gave it to me after I found the family. My next project is going to be an acid-free, linen-lined shadowbox crafted with the skills nurtured by one family to hold a precious gift from the other.