6.03 The Ungraduate... Lorelai's come to bed after her late night at the Inn...
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There's that smell.
That smell that's come to mean home. That isn't so much smelled really as breathed in then recognized in a deep heart-place. She can't identify its components but finds it far more satisfying than any chocolate or sex or great movie could ever be. And, she's come to recognize this... peace, (for that's what it is) as not only home now, but love. Real and abiding, nurturing, and not about the fear that is interlaced with the love one has for a child.
The love-fear for a baby (whatever age) one has birthed is, after all, primal and protective. Fierce even. One can never fully be at peace with it. Its depth just won't allow that, even when you're trying with every fiber of your being to be the coolest mom on the planet. You just can't be sure, ever, however hard you rationalize, that your child is, at all times, perfectly safe. No one tells you that life-long fear will be your constant companion before you have a baby, but it dawns on you pretty damn quick. Part of this fear, too, is knowing that your child will never fully understand it until they are a parent themselves.
Well, that's motherhood.
But the peace with Luke, the smell that is the peace, (same thing really) and the love that is interwoven within it, and has crept up at a most surprising time in her life, allows her to burrow down and be taken care of. To let go. It welcomes and grows with her vulnerability. And it's all wrapped up beautifully in flannel and is just always gonna be there.
She knows that now.
But, as she cozies down into bed, her dog on the floor below, she's still far too awake, her mind whirling through all that she's tried to keep at bay by making life busier than it ought to be, to rest quite yet. Not really. Because the love-fear, the my-baby-is-out-there-and-anything-can-happen-love-fear always, always comes back in the dark.
Even as she lays between the two newest pillars of her family, on guard at either side, absorbing the air surely permeated with their love for her, she's just not gonna get to sleep yet.
So, despite the smell, despite that she's now pressing her feet, cold from padding quietly around the dark apartment, against his warm legs (he doesn't flinch, but moves closer to her, warming her, caring for her even in his sleep---another mark of home...) Even as her sweet dog softly snores...
She's twirling her hair and remembering. And knows she can't share all the new loves in her life with her most abiding. And that she won't have a family until she's found a way to stitch together again all that's been undone.
Rory had been a child comprised of complex sets of opposites.
Beautiful as light reflecting off china, yet sober as a hymn. Full of unasked questions though hungry to know. Happy to live in a world of her own making, but yearning to step out into real life.
As a child who'd lost her own youth early, Lorelai had fiercely guarded that of her daughter's. Perhaps it had been wrong. What the hell had she other than instinct? She well knew, in her heart of hearts, that her daughter had steel within too. That she could be strong enough to find her own way... But she worried now that she'd never be given that true chance. That true gift.
So she sighed then and turned to spoon her back into Luke and watch Paul Anka's breath rise and fall, fingering the comforter as memory took hold of her exhausted mind...
Rory hadn't ever had the interest in sewing that she had. She herself had come to respect it. The puzzle work of laying out the pattern, the fretting to get seams into alignment. The heaven-sent, chest-puffing pride one felt to hold something in hand, something real and practical and beautiful and, most of all, useful.
It felt... grown up. Something a lonely teenage mom spends a lot of time pretending to be, but gets very little genuine practice experiencing.
There is also a letting go of self in sewing. A Zen-kinda thing, she imagined. Or, as close to it as her caffeine-addicted body would ever come to know.
Forcing herself into the patience sewing requires, the undoing of stitches set wrong, then the remaking of it all again, had helped her forge her way. She'd taught herself from library books; Used an old machine she'd found at the Inn. In short, she'd been resourceful, stuck to it, failed, picked up again, and, finally, mastered it.
Little summer dresses for her daughter, and shorts with elastic waist bands graduated into snazzy little jackets and, at last, quilts. And little Rory would sit nearby reading or coloring to the hum of the machine, her own Zen in these.
And that was much of the life in the pretty little potting shed. Humming and reading. Sometimes music on the radio. Macaroni and cheese. Playing monopoly on the bed on winter's nights wearing three sweatshirts apiece.
Sometimes five year old Rory would let her mother drape her in fabric scraps for fun, then eight year old Rory would occasionally help her lay out the colorful quilt blocks, but she would always retreat to the warm corner to read soon after, leaving her mother to the real work of stitching.
Which was fine. She liked the work of putting a quilt together. She loved the feeling of seeing the quilt finished, and she was more than content to wrap it warmly around her daughter at night. It made her feel like she might just be a real mother after all, and not just a little girl playing house. It meant that she was 'taking care of things.'
Quilting requires precise cutting, an eye for color, a certain perception of shape and space, the willingness to not overthink the scheme of it all, absolute attention to the up-down thrum of the needle, and love.
And because Lorelai strove to master these, her daughter need not. That's how such things often work between parents and children. But, as skills have been passed from mother to daughter throughout history by a sort proximal osmosis, so must (she fervently prays) the real lessons of the work.
She doesn't give a rat's ass if Rory never sews a stitch in her life. That isn't the point at all.
She watched then as Paul Anka squirmed, struggling with a bad dream. A watch-sporting wrist perhaps. Or maybe just an escaping rabbit.
She wiggled back, closer still to Luke and his warm smell, and thought then about the simplest of all quilts to make: Block patterns. It's where new quilters invariably begin. Getting that middle right is the trickiest part, where the four corners come together. Lining them up perfectly isn't easy at all. She's stitched, ripped out, and stitched again hundreds of times to get the ideal balance.
This is especially difficult with fabrics of different weights. A flannel is heavier than dotted swiss, and silk lighter than corduroy. And most books strongly advise against quilting with different weights of fabric, but she, of course, had tried. With mixed results.
A lot of sewing. A lot of undoing. A lot of work to stitch it finally, tightly together...
But worth the work. So worth the work, she thought as she yawned and drifted...
Because you just can't get completely warm until the quilt is finished...