Behind the Lens & Between the Feedings: Dispatch №11
On becoming a person who has opinions about thread.
I want to be upfront about something: I am a person who Googles things extensively before committing to them. Restaurants, camera lenses, the precise thread count of sheets. I research with the focused energy of someone who believes that the correct answer exists and can be found if you look hard enough and read enough Reddit threads at midnight.
So when my mom suggested we walk up to a needlepoint shop on the Upper East Side when the baby was about a month old, I said yes immediately and did not research anything first. Which should tell you something about the state I was in.
Rita's is the kind of shop that smells like possibility and wool. My mom helped me pick out two canvases, sat me down, and taught me everything I needed to know in approximately fifteen minutes. I now have a very specific new personality.
I want to be clear that I always thought needlepoint was a granny hobby. I say this with full awareness that I am now someone who designs her own canvases because buying them has gotten expensive, has strong opinions about thread brands, and recently spent twenty minutes on Instagram watching a stranger teach decorative stitches in complete silence. My For You page has fully reorganized itself around this and I have made peace with that.
What I was looking for without knowing I was looking for it
Here is the thing about the creative outlets I already had before she arrived: they require something from me. Photography requires presence, intention, the particular alertness of someone watching for the right moment. Writing requires the ability to hold a thought long enough to finish it, which is a skill that leaves the body somewhere around week three of sleep deprivation and only partially returns.
I needed something that didn't need me to be sharp. Something my hands could do while the rest of me quietly put itself back together. A way to give the photographer brain a complete break. Not by switching it off, but by handing it something entirely different to do.
Needlepoint, it turns out, is that thing. There is a specific and surprising mercy in a hobby that is entirely about the next stitch. Not the finished piece, not the overall pattern, just the thread going through the canvas in front of you right now. My brain, which has spent the last several months either managing a newborn or managing the guilt of not managing a newborn correctly, gets to be almost completely still. The to-do list doesn't disappear exactly. It just moves to another room for a while.
I do this during nap time, which is also when I am supposed to be sleeping, and I have made my peace with that too.
The part where it accidentally became something
What I didn't expect was that I would get better at it. Not just competent — actually better, in a way I can see and measure. Which is a feeling I had forgotten I was allowed to have.
I started with kits. Then I started designing my own canvases, partly because buying them adds up quickly and partly because apparently I cannot do anything without eventually trying to control the creative direction. Some things don't change just because you become a mom.
A brief update from hobby central
A couple weeks ago I ordered oil pastels and a sketchbook from Amazon at 11pm.
I don't know how to use oil pastels. I have never particularly wanted to learn how to use oil pastels. And yet there they were in my cart and there I was clicking confirm and here we are.
I think what's actually happening — underneath the needlepoint and the oil pastels and whatever comes next — is that I am a person who needs to be making something. Not producing, not delivering, not optimizing. Just making. With my hands, quietly, in the small hours when she's finally asleep and the apartment is still and I get to be a person who is learning something new just because she wants to.
It turns out that person was always in here. She just needed a very small human and a shop on the Upper East Side to remind her she existed.
More soon. Possibly in cross-stitch. 🤍