Past Times

It’s time that’s condensing. Time is what gives meaning to everything. The sun marks time, and we abide naturally within it. Our skin holds time, but our mind can play its own game. Our minds can choose to disregard the passage of time. It can hold on desperately to lost moments as if they were in the present. Pretend we’re dancing in youth as we slip further into our years. Without markers, our mind is free to position us wherever it likes, and before you catch up, years have slipped by and our progress alike. Yet, when you watch something in its inception, for which time is essential. The changes that come day by day are enough to chronicle your days too. When you’re with children, each week is monumental, and so too, do you begin to count time again.

What started as a nod to a stereotype took a slow turn and continued to pivot until it was 180 degrees later, and I was looking at myself, rather than those easy-to-categorise mothers from bygone eras.

Needlework, the housemaker's pastime. Decorative, ungroundbreaking, pre-Internet. A representation of a worn apron and a warm oven, blankets that cover the seats of sofas and wall hangings with punny messages. Needlework is for non-achievers. For idle hands with idle time. There’s a nervousness that can be identified with the tiny knots and obsessive repetition. Here I am, pointing the finger and recoiling, yet I find myself spending more time than it takes to crochet, re-presenting the needlework through my pinpoint pencil work. I am in the same position as the women I observe. I am The Mother. Undeniably, although I try. And there lies the whole meaning. I am a part of the collective I don’t associate with. I am no different. The same question of craft over art. What makes it art? I layered lacework over the Vogue cover by Henrik Purienne. Purienne photographs naked women in their twenties. Smoking icy bongs, tanning and perhaps something as busy as brushing their hair or lighting up a cigarette next to a pool somewhere hot, dry and slow. Purienne’s photographs are the exact opposite of motherhood. They are selfish and time-ignorant. They are my youth, more in feeling than visual representation, unfortunately. He depicts time as one long and never-ending afternoon. A nap that you wake from, not caring when you drifted off or when you’ve awakened. Time, still. That isn't a concept in motherhood. Time is slipping steadily and infuriatingly out of our hands and out of control. There are no irresponsible long afternoons into sunset. It’s bath time, bedtime for them, tidy-up time and bedtime for us. Vogue, in which the Purienne photograph made the cover. French Vogue. Representative, of course, the desire that is now within you. The how-to live a better life, a life more considered, more chic. It’s all the things I looked up to in my 20s. All the things I wanted to be before I became a mother. And then you realise the bullshit in it all. It’s not that I care less about being chic - in ways, I think it’s even more. But I think there’s something in motherhood where you realise the innate knowing we have. I need to be told less. Somehow, we all know how to do the most difficult thing a human is faced with - go on, raise another! And we just do it. We can just do it. How subversive. The layering of my lessons atop the lessons I used to want to be told. My drawing of the needlework is the reality over the old dream. The reality over the fantasy. Everyone’s fantasy, men and women alike. It's even more for the women as we try to squeeze our way into the men's fantasy. A mother is not a man's fantasy. Their own mother, maybe, in some twisted, Oedipal way. But as a woman becomes a mother, the hierarchies shuffle. You are less important. You must stick around, sure, but I cannot be the bong-smoking, time-ignorant, responsibility-less girl anymore. I will try, but it will not work. I will instead put my efforts into something worthwhile. Needlework, no - raising children.