Seventeen years I’ve had that wool? Actually more like nineteen. I sound like the world’s slowest knitter. It’s just that I haven’t used that particular wool in awhile, I kept buying more. A bright turquoise for my granddaughter, lime green, purple, pinks to make scarves for the homeless. A yarn shop closed so I bought multiple skeins of fuzzy, loopy yarn for possible scarves or collages. Skeins of revolving rainbow-colored yarn sits on open shelves like a favorite painting. Most of the Brown Sheep wool that I brought home from Holden is for warm, bulky sweaters like the ones I needed at Holden, in the winter, and in Minnesota, in the winter. But it doesn’t get as cold in Bellingham so I’ve made sweaters out of lighter weight wool.
I don’t stick to patterns. I find wool I like or someone else likes and agree to make a sweater, figure out the gauge and then off I go until I get in trouble and lose the shape I aimed for. Then I take the troubled sweater to the knit shop and figure it out with another knitter. Once I took a knitting class on making sweaters without a pattern, but I missed too many classes because of work. And most of the women spent the time discussing their trips, I am not gracious around travelers because I can no longer afford to travel and I miss it. Sometimes it’s possible to tell the mood of a knitter from the gauge, in this case my envy tightened my gauge to the point I had to unravel part of the sweater. Must work on traveler envy.
After leaving Holden’s supportive knitting environment, it’s been harder for me to find the time to finish a sweater. Finishing sweaters requires a lot of concentration to keep track of the stitches and the gauge. I love knitting in the round. If I could just knit up sweater bodies to the armholes, I’d have knitted up all my wool. But now if I’m at a meeting where I’m to pay attention or talking to someone I forget to mark the rows and lose track of when I need to increase or decrease. I guess meetings at Holden didn’t require my attention. My hands go on automatic and there’s no stopping them. Sometimes I just let them go and then go back and unravel my mistakes. Other times I stop my knitting and then fidget during the rest of the meeting because I would rather be knitting.
One time I agreed to make a hat for someone out of an expensive homespun yarn that she’d bought. It was lovely wool, but the weight was uneven so it was hard to get the hat to look exactly like the picture. I spent about five hours on it. The woman didn’t like the finished hat. She wanted a completely different shape and wanted me to knit it for free. So I unraveled the hat and gave her back the yarn. It was very satisfying.
One reason I like knitting is because it is so easy to undo a mistake, just give the yarn a tug and out comes your mistakes. Wouldn’t it be great if we could undo life’s mistakes as easily? “Opps, I shouldn’t have said that,” give the remark a tug, and it’s undone, no one gets hurt. My mother is an intelligent, vital woman and still making important business decisions. The other day I was frustrated with her for defending my dad’s decisions about his trust. Then suddenly she unraveled and in her brief tirade she admitted to me that she wished she had stood up to my father. I was stunned; she had always remained silent about his abuse and had resisted my questioning his behavior.
She even recalled the rose bush incident. She said she wished she’d protected me-- words I had always wanted to hear. Or did she say that? Did I just want her to say that? I was so stunned that she remembered the incident and that she actually admitted that she wished that she had stood up to my father - my mind was stuck on those words. “I wish that I had stood up to your father” that I held my breath.
The rose bush. She said she wished that she had protected me, and yet it was one time when I had consciously stepped back and wanted her to protect herself. I had dug up part of a 100-year old rose bush from a house that I couldn’t afford to keep and planted in her yard a couple of years before. Now I wanted to bring it to my new home and she and I were having trouble digging it up. Suddenly father stormed out of the house yelling at us. I thought he was crazy; the rose had nothing to do with him, what would have made him so mad? Sometimes I tried to defend my mother and he would turn on me. But this time I remember thinking my father had crossed the line of justifiable anger (justified yelling: a messy house, giggling at the table, swearing under the table when picking up a fork). So I consciously stepped back and did not interfere. I wanted my mother to stand up to him. When he called my mother stupid, it broke my heart. Now my mother is saying she wished she’d stood up to him, that she had protected me. I don’t remember if I’ve ever heard her so emotional, so angry and hurt and so straightforward in what she had to say.
Tears rolled down my face as she sobbed and told me she was 88 years old and she didn’t want to end up taken care of by people who didn’t care about her. (She was probably reacting, in part, to my complaints about my job). She had to decide what she wanted to do about the next phase of her life. She went on to list all of the people and business that she was expected to take care of. She said she could understand what I felt not being appreciated because she didn’t feel appreciated either and then she slammed down the phone. When I called her back, she was her lighter self again.
I had unexpectedly tugged on the right emotion for my mother to unravel a small part of our difficult past, a part that was an important touchstone for me. Our relationship is much too complicated for one outburst to fix. I roll her confession around in my mind in and in my heart, I don’t know what, if anything, to do with such a remarkable admission.
When my daughter gets home from school today I need to trap her into trying on the sweater I’m knitting for her, again, to make sure I’ve made the correct adjustments so I can knit at tonight’s board meeting.
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