Making
Why bother?
Years ago, my oldest sons were in a community preschool where the parents volunteered as staff. During your weekly shifts, you could bring in a project to do with the children. The kids tended to really enjoy cooking projects, so one day I brought in our pasta maker and I made fettucine with the kids in the preschool. We cooked it and ate it with butter and parmesan. It was good, and the children had a lot of fun making and eating.
One of the moms, also on shift that day, was sitting at my table after the paper plates of pasta had been passed around. She looked at me and said, “I would never make pasta. I would always buy it.” Oddly, she sounded really pissed. I told a friend about it later and my friend said, “You should have said, ‘You mean I can buy pasta??!!’” Which, of course, would have been the perfect response.
Making things. What’s the point? You can buy everything!
My mom and dad were extreme makers and doers. My dad designed and together they built the house I grew up in. My father had an affinity for all things mechanical. He seemed to understand intuitively how anything worked, what it needed, when broken, to be restored to working order. My mother canned, did a lot of handwork, crochet and embroidery, and made things out of wood. They gardened and composted (before that was in vogue) and tended a small orchard.
I grew up with the idea—unstated, but lived—that there was an intelligence inherent in human hands that manifested through doing and making. Also that making things was fun and satisfying. A couple of days ago, I harvested some rosemary blossoms, some lavender blossoms, and a couple of lemons. I now have four mason jars filled with water, lemon juice, those fragrant sprigs, and some sugar fermenting into a natural soda. I had a lot of fun that first day, but I’m continuing to have fun as I watch the brew start to bubble, as I open the lids and sniff that yummy every day.
I almost can’t help myself, and will often opt to do or make or fiddle around with something when the floor should be mopped or I have some paperwork to do or boring phone calls to make. But it’s not just about procrastination; it’s about asserting some essential human part of myself that might go dark otherwise.
I realize that today’s world is busy, leaving little time for anything other than earning and engaging in tasks of survival. I also acknowledge that techy things, like writing code, can be creative; you write code and you’ve created a product that wasn’t there before that does something or has the potential to do something. (If I sound like I don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s because I don’t know what I’m talking about.)
But I think there’s something different about using your hands to mess around with three-dimensional materials. Clickety clacking on a keyboard does not scratch the same itch, at least not for me. I consider making part of our human inheritance; for most of our existence, we made things with our hands every day. And then, about 1.5 grannies ago, we found ourselves in a world where we could buy everything we needed and wanted; we didn’t have to make any more. Most of us alive today in the first world have only known that reality.
A couple of years after the pasta-making fun at the preschool, I attended an informational session at the local Waldorf School. The session was so well designed, it bordered on marketing genius. I was in a group of parents that included lawyers, doctors, and high-powered businesspeople. This gathering was to introduce us to typical kindergarten activities in the Waldorf School. Over the course of our brief morning together, we sang, danced, painted, and finally found ourselves sitting in a circle, lawyers, doctors, titans of business, the rest of us, all stitching tiny felt gnomes and stuffing them with sheep wool. I remember one of the lawyers looking up from his stitching and saying, “I want this for my son.”
Not every parent is going to attend a Waldorf School informational session. People who think it’s frivolous, or weird, or dopey, or simply not academic enough in a dog-eat-dog world will self-select out. But I wonder about the professional parents that self-select in. Maybe they’re people who would appreciate a little more balance in their own lives that might afford some time for making or tinkering. Carl Jung wrote: “Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically…on their children than the unlived life of the parent.”
I’m not saying that the people in that informational session had unlived lives; how could I know that? I am saying that, while people are different, yes, and attracted to doing and being different things, there is a subset who will always have a longing to make and use their hands productively. I think that subset may be big.
Yes, Mary. Me and You, we make to make sense.
My mom grew up in a poor immigrant family during the Depression, which means she learned to sew, cook, bake, can and preserve, and to grow her own fruits and vegetables. When I was a kid, she had embraced modern conveniences (she was a working mom, after all) but we always had a vegetable garden, a compost pile, and she sewed a lot of our clothes when I was little (because before Wal-mart and fast fashion, it was cheaper to sew your own). She liked to knit and crochet and made lots of afghans. And for special occasions, we always did things the old way: our Christmas cookies were a traditional Hungarian recipe and my job was to grind the walnuts by hand in our antique grinder; pies and cakes were baked from scratch, etc. The message was “modern conveniences are nice, but if you want something REALLY good you should grow it or make it yourself.”
So I grow my veggies and berries; make my pickles and jam and homemade ice cream, bake my own pies and cakes, make my own tomato sauce, and at Christmas my daughters and I gather together to grind the walnuts and make the cookies the old way. I’ve made them all promise they’ll always make the same cookies at Christmas with their daughters and pass down the pie crust recipe from their grandmothers.
I read somewhere that an old woman in the early 1900s was asked why she loved knitting so much and she said “it’s the only thing I do that stays done!” and that struck a chord with me. So much of housework and office work is just endlessly doing the same thing over and over - tidying up the same toys that will be strewn about the next day, cleaning things that will just get dirty again tomorrow, folding the laundry to make way for more laundry, revising the numbers in the spreadsheet, completing more documentation that will have to be resubmitted again next month, updating the PowerPoint yet again, etc. A knitted hat, a pantry full of homemade pickles and preserves, a delicious meal all provide some much-needed feelings of completion and accomplishment.