beautiful rifts in time

on motherhood and time travel

Detail from the Unicorn Tapestries, 1495–1505

“But what else

can a mother give her daughter but such

beautiful rifts in time?” 

— From “The Pomegranate,” by Eavan Boland 

Here is something I have loved: seven medieval tapestries, woven 500 years ago, probably in celebration of a marriage, that now hang in a museum in the city where I live. They tell the story of a unicorn on the run, pursued by hunters and dogs. The panels are verdant, filled with oranges and forget-me-nots, rabbits and ducks. There is a rose garden, clear pools, and forests. Once, they decorated the bedchamber of a bride. 

Pregnant the summer I turned 30, I went as far north as the train would carry me to see these scenes woven in wool and silk in the museum on a hill. I stood in a dark gallery and pulled my fingers through my hair, tangled from sweat. My yet-to-be-born daughter’s small foot pushed from beneath the skin of my taut belly, moving my red dress, its hem fraying. This was many summers ago. I patted her foot and stood and stared at the unicorn at rest in the garden. The daughter I was growing—I could almost feel her standing beside me. 

Motherhood has given me many things. Among its strange gifts is something I can only describe as chronology sickness. I get seasick, too. My body becomes confused by the signals it receives and can’t interpret them. I break out into cold sweats and have to steady myself. In the same way, the parts of me that thought they understood time got tangled up when I became a mother. I think of time and the order of my life’s events, what has come before, and what will come after, and I feel ill. 

The seven panels of the Unicorn Tapestries are these: The Hunters Enter the Woods, The Unicorn is Found, The Unicorn Attacked, The Unicorn Defends Itself, The Unicorn Captured by the Virgin (two fragments), The Unicorn Killed and Brought to the Castle, and The Unicorn in Captivity No Longer Dead. 

There are many theories about the stories told by the tapestries. One theory is that they speak of taming a wild heart, the beloved caught and kept. Other scholars believe them to be an allegory for Christ and his mother. No one knows the sequence in which the tapestries were meant to be hung. We can guess at an order, but no one can name the correct progression for certain.

Detail from the Unicorn Tapestries, 1495 - 1505

My daughter is six years old now, and wants no doll for comfort, no faded blanket or teddy bear worn thin with love. She wants my hair. This is how I take my coffee: at the table in our apartment, my daughter on my lap, her warm cheek on my shoulder, her tiny fist wrapped around the red threads of my hair. It is like this each and every morning. It has always been this way. 

She twirls my hair, and I think of the woven panels in the museum on the hill, their ripe symbols. She passes a strand through her fingers, and I think of the artists at work with their weaving, pulling threads to tell a story, to craft something that will keep. 

I lay beside her in bed one spring, the two of us curled into one another on the bottom bunk, her older brother sleeping above us. I wove fairy lights through the slats so that she might have something of a hideout, a space all her own. I taught her how to stand on her mattress and tuck blankets so that she could build a fort for playing, for solitude. But she always pulls me in with her. 

I dreamed of her before she was born—a grown girl whose face was lit by birthday candles, telling me her name. Now she’s here. She’s obsessed with hawks. She loves mummies and vampires and ABBA. Some things we love together are watching birds from our fire escape and tall-masted ships. I made her a moon costume for her second Halloween using a black sweatshirt, papier mache, and glow-in-the-dark paint. “My moon!” she yelled when I held up the finished costume, which is what still escapes her mouth anytime she catches a glimpse of the moon in the daytime sky or when she holds my face in her hands. “My moon.” She paints unicorns in watercolor and cuts them out. I tear pieces of Scotch tape, and she hangs the unicorns on the wall beside her bed. 

Together in the bottom bunk one spring, she wrapped her fist around my hair.

“I’m sad I didn’t get to grow up with you,” she said. 

I touched her cheek. “You do get to grow up with me. I’m right here.” 

“No,” she said. “I mean I’m sad we didn’t get to be little girls at the same time.” 

There is a simplicity to the time travel of motherhood and in the delicate intimacy of bedtime conversations. There is no quest, no machine. We suddenly become girls encountering one another. I want to offer her the girl I was, the one I am. I want to be present for the woman she’ll become.  

Here is something else I have loved: a poem by

Nikita Gill

:

In another universe, 

I meet my mother 

when she is a child. 

We go for a walk at the seaside 

and she tells me all the things 

she loves about the world. 

We share a hundred jokes 

and she laughs so easily, 

without a single worry. 

I want to meet that version of her. 

Wide eyed and full of joy. 

Easy laughter and carefree. 

Before the same world 

she loved so deeply 

broke her heart. 

I want to introduce this version of myself to my daughter—me at six standing in the driveway in the summer rain, watching colored chalk blur on the pavement. I want her to know I’ve been thinking of her since I was her age. My heart has never existed without her in it.  

Detail from the Unicorn Tapestries, 1495 - 1505

There is a poem by Kathryn Nuernberger called “The Unicorn Tapestries” in which she writes about Renaissance masters whose job was rendering light—angels and sky—and the apprentices left to do the solid bodies of the rabbits and foxes.  

In the bottom bunk, beneath the fairy lights, my daughter’s watercolor paintings of unicorns taped to the wall beside us, I think of the master craftsmen dealing with the intangible and feel I have discovered something. 

What I mean when I talk about the past is that I have always loved you, and I mean something similar when I talk about the future, that this love will always be. These moments of our togetherness are wrapped in and around each other, laid beside one another. Mother and daughter weave through time, creating a picture. This is not an allegory of capture but one of soft recognition, of reaching toward something together and separately. There will be missing parts. Some of the edges will unravel. 

There is the straightforward business of progressing, stepping from one moment into the one that follows it. But I don’t know everything about the laws of physics. Maybe some are only loose suggestions. What I know is that I have had encounters in which my whole body sings, I have met you before, I have loved you always like the hand on a clock suddenly ticking backward, in which words like Now, Before, Later, and Someday lose all meaning. 

Last night in her red dress, my daughter untied the sash around her back. On my knees, I held my arms out. Pulling me close to her, she wrapped the red ribbon around me, binding us together. She laughed as she tied it tight, and I knew she understood. Cosmic rays, high-energy particle showers—this is how I love you: wildly and independent of time.