ABSURDLY LARGE FAMILIES

The Velveteen Blankie

“Real” civilization is born of textiles that bind

How do blankies become “real?”

We f*ck our way into the world,¹ usually underneath bed quilts of some kind. If we are lucky we live long enough to see the trappings of our sexing stretch out into the vastness of time. Rabbits are quick breeders. But humans are makers not only of more humans, but also of sentimental objects with staying power.

What separates us civilized folks from the coarse f*ckers that came before us?

Like the Velveteen Rabbit, my pale yellow blankie has been loved and soiled almost to the point of obsolescence and ruin. It became “real” when I passed it on to our fourth child, Zeke.

Or maybe it was our third child, Easter, who resurrected it. Sh*t — I have six kids and don’t remember. But I do know it’s passed through the hands of the latter four.

Who made my blankie — if you can even call it mine anymore? It was Grandma Platte. Not my grandma, but my dad’s grandma.

Viola Catherine Platte, of Westphalia, Michigan, sewed my soft, yellow, rabbited blankie for me. At the time I was Tim and Kim’s baby-to-be. Viola barely knew my mom, nor her grandson — my dad. There were just too many grandkids to know each of them well.

Great-Grandma Platte didn’t know if I would be a boy or a girl; gender was looked at as strictly binary by those of her generation. Even in the early 1980’s it was still looked at in an oversimplified way. In most of Mid-Michigan it still is.

So the blankie she made was a “sex-neutral, gender-neutral” yellow.

“It” was a girl!

I also wore a yellow bib that a squadron wife had made. It said “Little Killer” on it, as my dad’s Navy pilot call sign had been Killer Miller. Those military wives have a sense of irony.

But even bibs with vague threats of violence are precious. I was a lucky infant.

Popular lore on anthropologist Margaret Mead says that her idea of budding civilization was a healed human femur.² This was a sign of caregiving, empathy, and (possibly) a division of labor; in the first civilizations there must have been bonesetters who had different roles than hunters and gatherers.

But I think it’s simpler. Baby blankets — and infant clothes, too — mark a civilization. Blankies that were made by previous generations, in anticipation of the ones to come.

The warmth goes beyond one’s close kin. Viola sewed the facing and batting and embroidered embellishment not for her child. Not for her child’s child, either. When you make something for your child’s child’s child, you share about 12.5% of your genes with the craft’s recipient — it’s not just for someone in your own small sphere. And, as the yellow blankie ended up on the backs of Viola’s child’s child’s child’s children, the shared autosomes are likely even fewer.

Before there were cities and community healers, altruistic makers took care of us all.

My big, fat, Midwestern Catholic family is not of the Quiverfull Movement. Not even close. Many of us are of the religious left.

But there are lots of us.

Harold Platte and the blanket-maker had 12 children. Did the blanketer herald the arrivals of each great-grandchild this way? I’m not sure.

Then, that couple’s eldest daughter — my grandma, Mary “Kathleen” Platte Miller — had nine kids.

Grandma made afghans for each of her grandkids.

My dad had two kids. And my oldest child is the eldest of Ham and Kathleen Miller’s 33 (and counting) great-grandkids. Ham is gone. Viola is long departed. But Viola’s gift to me has covered and snuggled during sickness and been wrung out and dragged all over and peed on by people with whom she’s only fleetingly related.

Flesh of my flesh, bones of my bones? Just barely.

6% of a shared (encoded) genome is nothing to sneeze at. But Viola C. Platte never met Easter, Zeke, Gale, or Andy — or John or Wes, for that matter. She never met Joe, my husband. She missed our last four kids by more than a decade. If this care and keeping of others isn’t altruism, I don’t know what is.

My aunts, my dad’s sisters and sisters-in-law, made blankies for my kids before their births. So did my husband’s cousin.

And as Marianne Moore wrote in What Are Years, “This is mortality, this is eternity.” I’m really f*cking lucky to be part of the human tribe.

If I’m even luckier, my future great-great-grandkids will feel the warmth, too.

¹ I can’t help but use language that would shock a grandma. The word fuck — it’s what I publish. It’s who I am, too. I am…a civilized f*ck.

² More on this, by Gideon Lasco, here.

Further reading on my big-ass family:

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