Containment
Containment is a project-in-progress about psychological formation. Photographs of children interacting with handmade quilts against bursts of green growth look at complex expressions of wildness and care in motherhood. They speak of aggression, containment and love.
In psychoanalysis, containment is the experience of being kept whole. It is the way a parent takes in a child’s wild emotions and, in describing them, transforms them into something that can be thought about. The absence of this stitching together brings Elena Ferrante’s “dissolving margins,” a state of anxious terror where “the outlines of people and things suddenly dissolved.”
When containing my children’s storming emotions, I contain my own reactions: exhaustion and anger at their continuous, unpredictable intrusions into my internal world. But my work also speaks of the luminous beauty, friendships and tenderness I know intimately as a parent. What a gift to be the listening ear: incomparable connection, closeness, and meaning.
D.W. Winnicott thought the mother “has to be able to tolerate hating her baby without doing anything about it.” A reader might recoil: What does this say about my mother? And myself? Why have children at all! But any true love contains hate, and acknowledging the power and complexity of parent-child relationships casts off suffocating expectations of mothers as sentimental, masochistic, and inherently nurturing. I want to describe fully what it means to mother, love, contain and transmit.
I speak of mothers specifically because of our symbolic cultural weight. Thought to represent all women, the intensity of our symbolism leaks onto care providers, whose labor is disregarded as naturally-flowing and undeserving of consideration.
Jacqueline Rose writes, “Mothers always fail… as mothers are seen as the fons et origo of the world, there is nothing easier than to make social deterioration look like something which it’s the sacred duty of mothers to prevent.” How would our familial and societal relationships flourish if we recognized the hidden labor of containment and transmission?
So we look at each other. My children and their friends hold my gaze sternly, lounge with a blush of Cheeto dust on their faces, or close their eyes in refusal. Quilts envelop – contain – as children wrestle, hide and revel in being held. A bee works on blighted mountain laurel; grapes grow elementally plump with leaves going crisp at the edges.
Quilts are caregiving objects, holding ideas of warmth, labor, mundanity, destruction and reconstruction. Their warmth elides the work, tearing, and needle jabs that brought them into being. I have also contained my children: grown them in my body, formed them with my milk. I contain my mother, my genes, my eyes, my self, whole worlds.