Women’s Work
All I needed to do was cut perfect squares of fabric and sew those perfect squares to each other.
After casting my vote on Election Day, I walked home and started quilting. Prior to voting I had lined up outside a local school for about an hour in a cold, drizzly rain. At one point a tree-maintenance crew pulled up, parked their enormous vehicle in the middle of the street, and began feeding branches into a wood chipper. It felt like an ominous metaphor. I was glad to be home in my quiet cocoon of an office where I didn’t need to think about the future of democracy or my daughters’ rights or our melting planet. All I needed to do was cut perfect squares of fabric and sew those perfect squares to each other.
This isn’t the first time I’ve turned my attention to fabric in times of crisis. I was prolific during the pandemic. Every family member received a handmade blanket. I churned out zippered pouches like nobody’s business. I even, in a weeklong episode I now realize was a cry for help, sewed a dress for myself to wear to a wedding. I realized too late that unlike blankets and pouches, dresses have curves. And buttons. And beautiful drapey fabric that is a bitch to feed through the sewing machine. By the end it was Frankenstein’s monster(‘s dress) and I was madly stitching and restitching pieces together with no rhyme or reason except for making it fit on my body because I need to get on a plane in 12 hours, dammit! The dress looked great, if you didn’t inspect it too closely or give it more than a gentle tug.
I don’t see myself veering into clothing this time. Straight lines are easy; they’re predictable; they’re a beacon of sanity. When my phone alerts me that Matt Asshat Gaetz has been tapped for Attorney General I can simply let that information flow through me as I continue stitching squares to squares. Eventually those squares will make bigger squares and become a quilt that I can roll myself into for my Nightly Disassociation Time (staring into space as I eat the snacks I hide on top of the fridge).
The phrase “America is a quilt” is stuck in my brain. Is it one of those metaphors, like the melting pot, that we learned in school? I can’t remember, but regardless, it doesn’t feel accurate today. Living in this country now feels less like being a unique part of a beautiful whole and more like speeding down a billboard- and strip-mall-lined highway to nowhere while talk radio blares from my speakers. Thus my need to hide in my office with my sewing machine, which only produces white noise (lower-case “w”).
The day after the election, I informed my oldest that the woman lost and the man won. She looked up at me with total innocence and asked, “Do you believe in him?” I wanted to cry. “No, honey, not even a little bit,” I replied. She ran away, her mind already on other things. She believes in this country like I believe in straight lines: if she just places one foot in front of the other, she’ll get to where she’s going.
“We just need to focus on our children and our community,” my friends and I have been saying in the aftermath of November 5th. What we women mean is that we’re burnt out. After the 2016 election we donated, we organized, we marched. We joined local and national advocacy groups. We shared our views on social media and with each other. In the leadup to this year’s election, every woman I talked to was writing letters to swing voters, phone banking, text banking, canvassing. We really thought we could change the tide, but the tide has swallowed us again. Our country is scaffolded by women’s work but will not abide a woman in the corner office.
And so I return to quilting, that quintessential women’s work, that polar opposite of capitalism. I am a proud feminist but women’s work still feels like a slur and I still feel like a cliché. I’m in my little office working on my little projects while my husband JOINS CALLS and CLOSES DEALS and EARNS THE MONEY to keep us in our home which, don’t get me wrong, is essential. But my soft italics instinctively shrink next to those imposing capitals. I feel my resolve shrinking too. People talk about women’s quiet power but all I see are loud men going red in the face as they shout over one another. I close my eyes and imagine a blanket big enough to smother them. I imagine a sea of women breaking into the Capitol to hold a quilting bee.
“Where do we go from here?” my friends and I ask. I suppose quilt-based violence is not the answer. But can we repurpose the scraps of our movement and stitch them into something bigger?
My husband shows me a pair of his pants with a frayed drawstring. “Can you fix this?” he asks, pointing to the frayed place and to where it’s stitched into the seam of the fabric. He’s even bought a special tool to rethread the drawstring, a tool that I already own in my sewing kit. “I don’t think so,” I say, “but I can really use that fabric!” He reluctantly hands them over; they’re his favorite pants but are out of style and therefore irreplaceable. He’s worn them so often that the fabric is incredibly soft and smooth and I feel a pang as I start cutting it into squares.
It’s the same pang I feel when I think about the next four years. I imagine my friends and I in 2028, running our hands over the worn fabric of our country, asking each other if the frayed remains can be remade into something that will keep us all warm. But women have always done this: sewn tattered pieces into something whole.
I snap back to the task in front of me. These poor, beloved pants. They’ll make a great quilt. I stitch and stitch and after a few hours have barely anything to show for it, but I know I’ll get there eventually.
