Quilting Imitates Life

Wrote this draft in September 2014.  There's more to the story than this girl ever knew.

The more I consider which quilting posts to write next, the more I realize how inextricably my life and its events are linked to my learning to quilt.  And how writing only about quilting is hollow to me.  It tells only a fraction of the story.

But starting at the beginning seems both unwieldy and unnecessarily boring.  So I'll start with the good stuff - the sewing.

For years, I made quit tops and never did anything with them.  I loved the math, the symmetry, the challenge of choosing colors that worked well together, and the beauty and art in the orderly.  But I didn't know the next step.  I watched a few tutorials about quilting, but never took the next step and tried it.

This also corresponded to a time in life when I was busy having babies and being a full time mama.  Maybe it's just me, but there's something in full time stay at home motherhood that, while rewarding for what it is, made me wonder if I had lost brain cells and skills.  I doubted that I could learn anything new.

So my quilt tops sat in a box, moved between houses as more and more children entered the family, I lost more and more of myself.

At the end of 2012, I decided that something needed to change.  I was tired of feeling unaccomplished. I could make a budget, run a household, mow the lawn and make a home, but those seemed so. . . repetitive.  Unfulfilling.  It likely didn't help that I had the constant "you're not enough" being whispered in my ear by my ex-husband.  He never directly said it, but he would ask what I did all day, or he would comment "if you were smart like us" to me when he was around friends.  I started to believe it.  I believed that I couldn't learn new skills or make decisions or control my own life.

For Christmas 2012, I quilted little doll quilts for my girls.  Then, I decided to make Christmas gift throw quilts for my kids.  I didn't actually finish them by Christmas, but they were great January gifts.  And I started something and saw it through to completion.  And I learned a new skill.  And something in my brain changed in a dramatic way.

My new desire to be more independent and more in control of my life didn't go over well everywhere.  My husband felt very threatened by any desire on my part to change.  Several times, he told me "I liked the girl I married."  I agreed that she was sweet at 22, but no one stays 22 forever.  People grow and mature and become something new.

To be continued...