Needled by the urge to create

After months of procrastination, I feel I’m ready to give into the mysterious calling to engage in intricate and meditative work that involves thread and textile, needles and rings and time

There’s a metaphorical itch I’ve been feeling that won’t go away despite repressing it through procrastination. My fingers are being summoned to do work that is intricate and meditative; work that involves thread and textile, needles and rings and time. I tell myself I don’t have the energy to organise these materials, particularly those related to time, inclination and thread. What is the source of this calling, even? I despised needlework as a child because it was framed as women’s work. Yet, now, when I see a recurring motif during my travels through Italy, I think, hmm, this would make for a great embroidery piece. It isn’t like I even know the stitches. I would have to tutor myself because I wasn’t an attentive student in my school days and frequently cheated by asking my mother to complete my needlework. Nowadays I put on a jacket, and I ‘see’ how it could be upcycled into a unique piece through imaginative threadwork.

I’ve put aside this physiological urge for months. After a day of work and mothering, when our toddler goes to bed, I usually have little energy to do anything beyond vegetating. Pregnancy diabetes ensures I spend a fair amount of time looking after my diet and feeding myself well—forced self-care—leaving me with only a sense of spent resources. Learning Italian has taken a backseat. I don’t feel like tricking myself into learning either (by registering for the B2 bilingual exams) because I am entering the third trimester and am committed to taking it easy. I want to start reading the Emily Wilson translation I recently bought of The Iliad, but I fear that reading two pages of a book in the evening would summon more sleep than I can bear, and my evening alone—time will be cut short.

It’s been difficult to admit to a lot of this, because, for so many years of my life I was independent and not obliged to take care of anyone other than myself in such an immersive way. I think a lot about my subjectivity and my sense of self, and how motherhood has altered my intellect. I often miss pursuing ideas or learning about updates within the Humanities. Recently, while editing a curatorial essay, I had to research terms like ‘life-worlds,’ ‘climate adaptability’ and ‘survivance’, because they were not part of my vocabulary. All of this is related to the notion of ‘de-skilling’ that happens in early motherhood, the process by which our intellectual thoughts and ideas stagnate because we do not have the time to update ourselves. 

A lot of my recent research has involved trying to understand how to keep up with my toddler who is two years and 10 months old, but who can now count, correctly, up to 30 in two languages and can confidently ‘READ’ numbers. I write ‘READ’ in capital letters because I am myself mystified by the fact that he can. Each morning, he insists on reading my blood sugar level off my glucose meter. He has never been wrong, whether the number is 74 or 88 or 90. Yesterday, he correctly read all the numbers off the licence plates we encountered during our walk to the parking lot. I haven’t taught him the alphabet song, because it is pointless for a child to learn just the sequence of letters without being able to recognise each one. He can, now successfully point out A, E, I, P, V, and F in both languages, and it is a bit confounding, because the sounds are different in English and German. In Italy and most of Europe, children between the ages of three to six who go to kindergarten are encouraged to focus solely on play. The system is vastly different from my childhood in Mumbai, where, while I was in Junior KG, we were already being taught patterns and knew our shapes. I remember attempting cursive writing at Senior KG. By the age of six, we were already writing and reading. I cannot say what system is better, but I am a believer in child-led learning and so I’m doing my best to follow our toddler’s lead. He began to read numbers because he was obsessed with pressing elevator buttons. When we read a book now, he wants to know what the text says. I’m told that knowing too much of the basics beforehand can make school boring, but is it fair to repress the body/mind’s desire to empower itself?

After months of procrastinating, I feel ready to give in and, in all likelihood, embroider the motif I am secretly obsessed with that I keep seeing in different places in Italy—a two-tailed mermaid. Perhaps in the needle’s eye I may find new extensions of myself.

Deliberating on the life and times of every woman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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