The Threads Have Always Been There

When I first began thinking about the arts component of my doctoral research, I had absolutely no idea what it might look like.

To be honest, I still don’t.

Recently, however, I stumbled across a metaphor that felt significant. It was whilst writing Broken Mosaics. The metaphor seemed fitting. My understanding of religion had never been built upon one coherent story. Rather, it had been pieced together over a lifetime from fragments of stories, observations, assumptions, and misunderstandings. A broken mosaic that I am only now beginning to piece back together.

Then something unexpected happened.

I found myself thinking about mosaics. I used to make mosaics for a short period of time in my thirties. But mosaics aren’t really part of Hungarian culture.

Embroidery is.

That thought led me to textiles. Then to crochet.

I have always preferred crochet over knitting. I could never really get the hang of knitting and would quickly become bored and frustrated with it. Crochet was different.

I have a crocheted blanket that we brought with us from Hungary. I have always found the colours hideous and the yarn isn’t the nicest. But I am sentimentally attached to it because it was made by Mama. It has been repaired numerous times over the years and, from memory (because it is currently in storage), now needs repairing again.

Mama died in 1978, when I was just two years old. I never really knew her. Yet throughout my life I have repeatedly been told that I am just like her—not only in appearance, but in personality and mannerisms. Perhaps that is why I have always felt that crochet was a way of connecting with her.

Then another memory surfaced.

Earlier this year, whilst talking with Anyuci about a crocheted doily I had made for her for Christmas, I confessed that I wasn’t sure whether she would like it. We had never really been a “doily family.”

That was when she told me that her grandmother—my great-grandmother—had crocheted doilies.

At the time, I simply absorbed that piece of information and didn’t think much more about it.

Until today.

Suddenly, crochet no longer connected me only to Mama and my paternal family.

It connected me to my maternal family as well.

It was as though I had been handed a thread. A thread connecting me to women I never had the opportunity to know. Almost like an umbilical cord stretching backwards through the generations.

And that’s when something shifted.

Until that moment, I had been trying to think of ways I might incorporate an arts component into my research. Now I find myself wondering whether I have been approaching the question from the wrong direction.

The threads have always been there—just waiting to be discovered.