She didn’t see it at first, wasn’t sure it breathed, its dotted fur camouflaged by leaves. A fawn, newborn wet, discovered under a cedar tree on what would have been her mother’s birthday.

###

Her mother would have wanted to take the fawn and raise it, her love of creatures with fur and feathers unwavering. She loved her children more abstractly, the idea of furless beasts in diapers more endearing than the reality of endless laundry, sleepless nights, little hands tugging at her.

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Before the children, her mother had started an embroidery of a doe and fawn standing at the edge of a pine grove. The stitch was simple enough— cross stitch, an X made with thread. Each X acted as a pixel. The deer, trees, flowers would emerge when the Xs printed on the fabric were covered with colored thread.

​

After stitching a block of green Xs, her mother quit. The stitch was easy, but the size of the picture overwhelming— a battalion of Xs printed on Irish linen. Thirty-five different thread colors. A graph the size of a poster with thirty-five symbols showing which color was intended for each X. It was a project for a medieval nun.

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Writing about a fawn and a dead mother skirts sentimentality, might even cross over. If grammar mistakes are misdemeanors, sentimentality is a felony. A dilemma— trying to write this without drifting into forbidden territory.

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Her mother died the day after Mother’s Day at 39. A Mother’s Day on which she’d signed only her name on the card. Had not added Xs for kisses. Said nothing about love. Does being a teenager explain it? Not exactly.

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After her mother died, her grandmother gave her the embroidery her mother hadn’t finished. An invitation.

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Every day that summer, she stitched. It was 1969. She watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon and stitched. Listened to Walter Cronkite read the death tolls from Viet Nam and stitched. Manson murders. She stitched. Woodstock. She stitched, trying to make sense of it.

 

She didn’t sign the card with love because her grandmother had instructed her not to. She lived with her grandmother, had been adopted by her grandmother. Love was a commodity in short supply. You might run out of it if you gave too much away.

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Maybe that’s not accurate. What she recalls is her grandmother saying, “You cannot sign the card ‘love.’ If you do, your mother will use that ‘love’ against you.” A complicated relationship between her grandmother and mother, the girl a telegraph wire stretched between them.

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Psychiatrists say that repetitive actions— stitching, tearing paper into small squares— burns adrenaline, calms the flight or fight response. She raged inside, wanted to run away. Instead, she compulsively stitched. Pierced taut fabric with a needle again and again, covering lines of Xs. Untangled skeins of thread and stitched, ten, twelve hours a day until a doe and fawn appeared. Stitched until wild iris and mountain laurel surrounded them. Stitched until every X was covered.

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When she was 41, she wrote a poem about discovering the fawn on her mother’s birthday, and presented it at famous poet’s workshop. A few praised the imagery, the line breaks. The famous poet curled his lips and spat the dreaded word. Sentimental. Branded with the scarlet S.

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When her mother opened the card on Mother’s Day, she remarked, “No ‘love’?” The girl didn’t respond, her grandmother seated beside her at the table. Had her grandmother been absent, she still wouldn’t have answered. Maybe.

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The embroidery of your life holds you in. A line from a Judy Collins song. Embroidery, a form of biography. Embroidery marking a girl’s path into womanhood. An art traditionally passed from mother to daughter.

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Unlike rabbit kits and fledging birds, children do not grow up to be released into the wild in one season. They linger, crying, puking, shitting, without fur to ruffle or bright blue feathers to leave behind.

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I have struggled to write this for more than 30 years.

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A fawn, though alone, is not abandoned and should not be touched or moved. Should not be stolen to be raised by a human. A doe returns for her young.

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I tried to find my mother in the stitches, using the map of colors, needling my way down rows of crosses. I tried to find her, needling my way through rows of kisses.

 

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

                                  XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

 

​                                                                       Stitch after stitch, Xing out all the mistakes.