From Our Contributors: The Button Box

Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: We first published Cristi Donoso’s work in our miCRo series back in 2021; the image of the caul from that poem still sticks with me today. We were also glad to publish her story “Rest” in our fall issue; it’s focused on the complicated dynamics within families, especially for women. In the first paragraph, the protagonist, Lydia, notably does not “stoop below her daughter’s small white desk, now the centerpiece of the family room, to gather up the tiny construction-paper piles that had formed there like anthills.” This emphasis on making, and not hiding the results of the process of making, is central to this essay that Cristi sent us:

The Button Box

After taking my son to school, I begin the task of organizing what we fondly call his “art cart.” In our townhouse, the small living room exists as an everything room for our family of three—the place where we relax, read, watch TV, talk, and play. I am not an organized person. But I do preside over microcosms of organization that exist amid the towers of papers, the chairfuls of laundry, and the leaning stacks of books. Food storage containers are themselves contained by one rolling shelf in a cupboard. In the linen closet, each size of towel or washcloth is maintained in a size-specific pile. The toys are regularly re-sorted into their respective bins, whose names announce my son’s primary interests: the little truck bin, the big truck bin, the garbage bin bin, the Lego bin, and so on. While these necessary collections are tucked away when not in use, the art cart is visually prominent, one of the first things to notice upon entering our house. And this visibility correlates to its relative importance in my son’s life.

The art cart, a three-level rolling cart that I purchased as a floor sample in a craft store, sits next to a child-size table and two three-legged stools. Every day, my son sits at this table and creates something. Over time, the cart has become stocked with items he has personally requested and items he did not know existed but I felt he might enjoy and therefore have supplied unasked. Markers of various sizes, crayons, tiny colored pencils and tall ones, paint sticks, glue sticks, wet glue, dry-erase markers, scissors, stapler, note cards, stickers, and more. There is white paper, color card stock, construction paper, and a pile of haphazardly used coloring books. The only items missing from the cart are the glue gun and finger paints (which require adult supervision) and the glitter (a necessarily controlled substance).

What his play area lacks in space, I’ve tried to make up for in the richness of his creative environment. Nearly all children make art, and some relish the making more than others. For my son, it has arisen as a necessity, a type of daily rest I’m motivated to protect. I’ve had the privilege of witnessing a wide range of children’s personalities as a pediatric speech therapist. As my son’s mother, I have the honor of witnessing his individuality—his spiritedness, his energy, his intense motivation to draw and color and cut and glue and make and make and make. And as a writer, a person who took decades to allow myself the title of poet, of artist, I take it as a sacred duty to create the necessary conditions for his art to exist, for nurturing his creative life, whatever form that will take along his journey as a human being. And among his varied art supplies, the one I consider to be absolutely vital is the one I have the least control over, the one whose contents I’ve had little role in assembling. Among the bins of tools and colors is a bin whose label is both literal and euphemistic: buttons & beads.

The button box contains, yes, buttons, but it also contains every type of small thing that comes into the life of a small child—things that cannot be categorized or seem to not want to be. These items have been found in the lining of his backpack, in the pocket of a sweatshirt, on the sidewalk, in his hand. They are former bracelet beads and tiny erasers, glittering pom-poms and silk flower petals, brassy buttons and sparkling bits of broken stone. The items in the button box are the ones the universe supplies, and for that reason they are, to me, the most precious. They are subject only to our gentle curation, to our loving application, and to my son’s intense or passing attention. They are my reminder that art is a response, a reaction to the elements of life that are outside of our control. Some people believe that, with enough belief, we can control everything in our lives. There is a part of me that craves that certainty deeply, and that is the part of me that paralyzes my art, that locks it from my own view. I have tortured myself, and likely others, in pursuit of command over the outcomes of my life.

When I recently came across a video where someone said, “Life is not a performance, it is an experience,” I realized that I have not, largely, viewed my life as something to be witnessed, as flowing moments of discovery over which I have little control. And yet, that is exactly what life has been. I have crawled through hardships that were exactly as terrible as I would have feared they might be. And I have been utterly stunned and overawed by joys whose grandeur I did not see coming, becoming my son’s mother foremost. And from those surprises comes my art. From those bits and bulks of life comes my poetry. So it is with humility that in the quiet of a weekday morning while my son is at school learning to read and write and make friends and do math, I take each thing out of his art cart and put each thing back into its place. With curiosity and hope, I pluck a stray silver star from under the rug and place it inside the button box, knowing only that he may make something of this, he can make something beautiful of all of it.

Cristi Donoso is an Ecuadorian American writer whose poems, essays, and stories have been published by or are forthcoming in Pleiades, Waxwing, The Journal, The Threepenny Review, Lake Effect, Best Small Fictions 2024, and others. She is a former PEN/Faulkner Writer in Residence and previous editor of Folio Literary Journal. Last year, she was a finalist for the 2024 Akron Poetry Prize and the 2024 Gatewood Prize. Born in Quito, she now lives in Virginia.