After a while, when you've taken 10 years or so of various workshops, you are ready for INDEPENDENT STUDY. Or so you think. The description of the class sounds ideal - bring your project and work on it, and get guidance and feedback from an expert. Perfect. You really didn't want to make anybody else’s pattern, you just want somebody who knows a WHOLE LOT about quilting to help you out when you get stuck. For five days there will be no kids, no carpools, people bringing you food and making your bed and entertaining you and bringing you cookies and cold drinks at appropriate intervals; heaven.

Well, that worked the first two times I took Independent Study - I brought a project, and the teacher left me alone to work on something I had in mind, and was there if I needed help. It was very satisfying - the project got done, everything flowed well, I worked until midnight if I felt like it, and only worried about the kids long distance.

It didn't work that way the third time. It just so happened that the third time I took Independent Study, I had a commission piece that I had already drawn and knew exactly how to finish, and I hadn't even cut the first piece of fabric for, and I only wanted the time and space to work on it. I didn't get it. The teacher TALKED to us and had us do exercises and guided meditations (I don't have TIME for this) and listen to journal entries from some dead person (who is this woman?) and watch demonstrations for at least 6 hours every day, and expected us to keep a journal, and write letters to our work and have the work write back to us and we were to TALK about our work on the fourth day (as if we'd had time to work), and I just WASN'T IN THE RIGHT PLACE TO DO THAT!!!

But the whole time I was working on my commission piece, I was envying the other people in the class who didn't have a commitment, who could try out the new things the teacher was talking about. I finally realized that the here and now is important, but the hereafter is just as important, if not more so, and that I really needed to know what the teacher was talking about if I was ever going to progress from the mundane to the ethereal, from the definitive to the abstract. And even if I never ever worked the way the teacher worked, or accomplish what he had accomplished, just trying it would still affect my work and my life from that point on, and I would never be quite the same again.

So I worked late the first three nights on my commission piece, and got it far enough to know that I could finish it by the deadline. Then I put it aside and started to work on the class project. The teacher had talked about working on an abstract piece that spoke in universal terms about a situation that I, personally, was facing. He wanted us to make a piece in such a way, in such abstract terms that others could put their own stories into the work and interpret it in any of a number of different ways. I normally go to great lengths to avoid soul-searching, preferring to err on the Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm side and decide there's nothing really worth worrying about, or the Scarlett O'Hara side of "I'll worry about that tomorrow." The teacher wanted me to do some real in-depth searching, and I didn't want to do it - just like I don't want to watch a drama on TV or read a book that's any deeper than a mystery or romance.

But I listened and I learned and I finally realized that there WAS something bothering me that I could put in universal terms. It came to me - listening to the dead woman's journal - that one day I would be dead, and that my children would probably outlive me, and that soon every one of them would be a teenager. This blew me away - both that I'd noticed it, and that it was true. I didn't realize that it was bothering me until I took time to listen to my inner self, and I didn't know what to do about it until the teacher showed me I could do something. The scary part of it is that when you do take the time, ignore your own agenda and fears and dig deep, the things that come out are important to you on such a fundamental level that you don't really want to share it with the world. If you do make it real, you are showing the world a piece of your soul; and if it is rejected, you are rejected. It's highly personal, highly subjective, and not always pretty. You can only hope that other people have been there and can understand.

My little quilt, made in the dark hours of the night before it was due, was a soul-wrenching experience that I had not been prepared for. Listening to the music, doing the exercises, listening to the dead woman's journal had brought me to a new place, a place were I knew I needed to say something to my eldest son as he graduated from high school, to my second son as he entered his sophomore year, and to my daughter who was just turning 13. Suddenly, they were all going to be teenagers, not children any more. I knew I didn't have time to make some monumental work - I just had time to make a miniature, a remembrance, a poem in fabric to my children to tell them I love them, fear for them, and hope for them, as they are turn older and become their own true selves. Perhaps Kahlil Gilbran said it best. He said, "Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of the Universe, no less than the moon and the stars...," and that is what I embroidered in gold on the background of the quilt. I think what he was talking about was letting go. Letting be. Coming to the realization that you as a parent are simply a channel through which your children came into the Universe, and once they are thinking, reasoning, adult beings, they belong again to the Universe, not to you. It's about not trying to force your children, or form them into what you think they ought to be. Your children must make their own place, find their own destiny, and you cannot do it for them, however much you want to protect them from the darkness.

This is a very hard concept for most mothers to accept; we want our children to do well, be happy, make us proud, and be fine, upstanding citizens. Sometimes we push a little too hard and lecture a little too loudly, and find that we might just as well be talking to a turnip. Once children are grown, all you can do is give them your love and faith and support, tell them you love them, and hope that they hear you. The problem is getting their attention. Children - especially teenagers - are busy, self-centered, and pretty much convinced that they are the cool, secure, ones, and you are so far in advanced decrepitude that it's a wonder you can still tie your shoes. There are only three things I do that really impress my kids: One is that I can spell almost anything. Second, I can type really fast. Third, I can make quilts.

I finally realized, that night, that I use my quilts to talk to my children in a way they listen to and can understand. I make quilts about beauty and nature and peace on our planet, and sometimes I make quilts about them. I've made each of their portraits as children, and now I was making a quilt about their coming of age, tears streaming down my face as I worked. Children are fragile things, just like this little quilt, and no one was more surprised than I was when I realized that all of my children made it to that momentous teenage milestone with all body parts still attached - minor operations, bike accidents, and broken bones notwithstanding. Suddenly, it became clear that what everybody said was true - children do learn, and grow, and go - and you have to let them. They have to face the world all by themselves. You cannot do it for them, and you cannot keep them from making mistakes. The only comfort is to remember that they are feeling much less lost than you are. To themselves, they are all knowing and all-powerful; the world is a wonderful place, and they are the coolest things in that world. At the very least, they figure they know a whole lot more than you do. The best thing you can do is to let them believe it as long as they can, and make them a quilt.

It's not easy to let a child go, let him make mistakes, let him get hurt and pick his own self up. According to a quilt, I saw a while ago, to have a child is to "let your heart walk around outside your body for the rest of your life," and I'm beginning to believe it. Sometimes it helps to make yourself deal with these turning points in life, and that's what this little quilt of mine is all about, in just the same way that women in days gone by made quilts to face their own realities. I understand that my children are individuals, free beings with their own problems and fears and visions, and all I can do is wish for a them golden future. In this quilt, I envision for them a mystical mélange of stars and infinite distances, and a golden path to lead them into their rightful place in the center of a wondrous Universe. Their place is a realm of infinite possibility, decorated with crystals and pearls, golden and silver threads, swirls and question marks and spirals; a mystery only they can solve.

Yeah, I know; it's not going to happen. But this quilt is not about reality, it's about wonder and magic and swirling visions - all that a mother would give her children, if she could. It's just a little wish, a breath of stardust and moonshine, but maybe that’s something only I can give them. Sure, there will be tough times, dark times, when they'll need all their strength and courage to make it through, but they'll make it. I hope.

And, yes, it seemed a little strange to write a letter to my quilt, but I went it one better. I wrote this little poem to it and printed it on the back of the quilt - just to clarify matters for those who don't think in threads, or piece their dreams in scraps of cotton, or embellish their memories with crystal beads:

My children,
Your path leads where I cannot follow.
You must dream your own dreams,
Find your own answers and
Follow the star path into your own possibilities.
I cannot know what lies ahead of you, so remember -
"The important thing is to carry the sun and moon and stars inside of you at every moment,
Against the darkness."
Reach for love, reach for life, and question everything.
May you live in joy and wonder, and
Never doubt that you are loved.
Mom

So, maybe my children will understand how I feel, and maybe they won't, but at least I've made an effort to tell them. I've put a little bit of myself out there for them to see, a part that I usually hide quite well. My children were my children, but now they belong to the Universe. Maybe they'll try and succeed, maybe they'll fail, but I know I have to let them grow, let them go, let them BE. The important thing is, now that I've made this little quilt, I think I can handle it.

I made this quilt under protest, kicking and screaming, dragged by the short hairs into the New Age, but it was important that I made it. It was important that I was in that class just then, that I was able to abandon my Midwest practicality and open my ears to hear what the teacher had to say, that I took the time to try, to listen to what was going on inside me, put aside my short-term goal, and learned an entirely new way of thinking and creating. I hope your next Independent Study isn't quite what you expected.

Linda Schmidt
E-mail shortattn@attbi.com
Web Site http://shortattn.home.attbi.com