Ettu's drawing of a spider, from when he was around five.
“Her mother was not unlike a spider, a repairer of broken things.”
During this last week, while visiting my parents near their hotel on Printer's Row in the south loop of Chicago, we happened upon a favorite bookstore from years' past, Sandmeyer's. The familiarity of the creaky wood floors and lofted ceilings lulled me into a quiet trance of sorts, and I paged through book after book in silent nostalgia (save the repetition of "mama, mama" emanating from the children's section where my kids sat leafing through their stash). We left with a few new books for the kids and another clutched under Nalin's arm, Cloth Lullaby, The Woven Life of Louise Bourgeois.
On Saturday, Mother's Day eve, I found myself reading this book to my daughter before bed. The timing of this bedtime story could not have been more apropos. As the title suggests, it tells the story of Louise Bourgeois, renowned sculptor and later textile artist. You could say that in a way she carried on the family business, as her parents were artists in their own rite — especially her mother, a weaver — being purveyors of a tapestry restoration workshop. After the family business closed in 1951, Louise continued on the family tradition in a way, as she made her art in a Brooklyn studio that was once a garment factory. Her most famous works were giant spiders, made of wood, steel, stone, and cast rubber. Her original sculpture, made of steel and marble (and 30-feet high) is called "Maman" (mother, in French). She later said of spiders, as if to strengthen the metaphor, "If you bash into a web of a spider, she doesn't get mad. She weaves and she repairs it." (Never getting mad is certainly something I, or other mothers I know, haven't mastered. So the spider has something on us with this.)
As clearly as this story is about Louise's life and art, it is a love story between mother and daughter. She writes about her mother especially, how she repaired fabric "grown threadbare with time," but also of her father in this passage:
“Louise’s mother was her best friend. Deliberate... patient, soothing... subtle indispensable... and as useful as an araignée (spider). Her father would bring back cloth scraps from his travels, and Louise’s mother fixed them. Two halves of a cloth would find their way back together again. Rentrayage — to reweave across the cut.. To make whole.”
Her mother taught her the skills of the trade: form and color, warp and weft, weaving, styles of textiles, the art of dyeing. And with this mentorship, she taught her how something can be strengthened, revived, made whole again with sufficient time and attention. What strikes me so deeply with this beautiful little book is the simplicity of the idea and the utter struggle of the execution. The metaphors of the spider as mother and the weaver as maternal and feminine are not new. We've seen them elsewhere in literature and pop culture. And any parent who has picked up a room of toys, strewn art supplies, and clothing only to do it all over again three or four times a day feels less like a spider reweaving a web and more like Sisyphus and his travails up the hill over and over again. But as a former lit scholar and junky, it is a least romantic to see the similarities, and Louise Bourgeois' beautiful and terrifying sculptures were as lovely an ode to her mother and to motherhood as you could ever imagine.
Nalin once took a natural dyeing class from a textile artist in Chicago, during his years learning more about textiles and weaving. She spoke of weaving at home with her small children lying on the ground underneath her vast loom, staring at the movement of the hands and the fibers as if watching a harpist pull at her strings. I imagine this scene often, sometimes simply to marvel at the feat of being able to work on one's art with little ones at foot (literally), other times to envy the sheer miracle of being such an incredible guide to her children by teaching them and creating alongside them. And of course we mothers don't have the monopoly on this type of mentorship; fathers everywhere share this journey. In our family, for sure, Nalin is often the one to model the creative and the crafty for our children. And he is the seamstress, the weaver, the knitter, the joiner and restorer of things. We just happen to have a holiday this last week to commemorate our roles. Don't fret, dads, yours is coming soon.
I am constantly looking for that diamond idea that will connect my passions with my family life and responsibilities, We talk about a family business, a venture that will involve our children and broaden their experiences and world views. I know families who have passion projects, whether charitable or creative (or both). In a recent issue of Kinfolk magazine, there is a portrait of a Singapore family, the Lims, who have started a publishing business of sorts, including an art collective and a zine, called Rubbish. The mother shares how her husband, a designer and teacher, realized that he was always sharing insight into creativity with his students or colleagues but wasn't doing the same for his kids. So they decided to start this collective and magazine "mainly for Renn and Aira [their children]. Hopefully 20 years down the road, they'll both look back at what we've done and will be able to fully comprehend what this was meant to be." She recounts:
“We relish this whole process of everyone working together, sharing ridiculous ideas, talking rubbish, feeling happy and even the feelings of frustration while trying to meet the deadlines. No words can describe how much closer we’ve become as a family after [our collective] was formed.”
Whether we call ourselves spider/weaver or mother/mentor, we all have significant roles to play, and the job is vast and overwhelming. One thing to remember, though, is it is never, ever about perfection. The web is forever broken, the fiber snagged and imperfect. It is, for certain, about the journey and what we make of it along the way. How, as Louise recalls of her mother and father's work, we rejoin fragments into one coherent piece. If we can pick ourselves back up and start over and seek to do it better the next time around, that's all we, or our children, can ever hope. And if we do finish something, oh the joys and satisfaction. Because their eyes are upon us, and their adoration is unconditional. Thank god.
Happy Mother's Day to all of you wonderful women out there. I'm amazed and inspired by you all.