Free-Range Knitter (14 page)

When I knit well and make beautiful things or finish things, it reminds me that I’m a winner and a person who gets things done. It’s healing and supportive, and I know picking up a piece of knitting and doing something right hundreds of times in a row, or eventually finishing a sweater and looking at how I was competent over and over and over again, I think that’s got to start leaking. I think if your self-esteem is a little bit bashed up, then knitting could help you fix that. That maybe if you could change what was possible for yourself in one way, then maybe
that would leak into all the other parts of your life. Knitting could be a phone line that rings straight into the kitchen of your inner self and says, “Hello? I just wanted to call and tell you that you’re wrong about me. I’m great, and I have the socks to prove it.”

Every person I have ever met feels deep down that if the world really knew them, if the world really knew what they were thinking or how they felt or about the mistakes they have made, if someone really found out the deepest, most true things about you, or if your inner self was allowed to make calls out, then all those people wouldn’t love you. They couldn’t love you really. This feeling is the reason that philosophers and religious leaders, mentors and mothers have been telling their lambs forever that it doesn’t matter what you think. It is only what you do that matters. It is enough to do the right thing, or a good thing, no matter what you are thinking, and the message knitting sends to that inner voice in your head is a simple one: “You are competent. You are doing the right thing. You are doing it over and over and over again. You are not making a mistake, and if you do, there is a way out. Good job. Also, great socks. You’re lucky to have ‘em.” And when you hear that, it can resonate and grow through you, and maybe, if you knit enough stitches in a row with that level of clear skill? Maybe the cover of
Cosmo
won’t matter to you so much, and you’ll tell your husband that it’s his damn time to do the dishes because fair is fair and you’re worth it. Or not.

Personal growth through the actual growth of knitting. It’s proof. It is tiny but real accomplishment, it is order out of chaos, it is usefulness drawn out of string. This is a small power, but one that you have, and as long as you are knitting, you can tell that inner voice to stuff a sock in it.

My daughter Megan is sixteen years old, and I love watching her knit the way that I loved watching her sleep when she was a newborn. (Megan says I freak her out, but I don’t care. As long as I’m keeping her alive and housed, I’ll look at her any way I want to.) Megan has grown up into a lot of things that I am not. Tall, for starters. Long limbed for another. Where I am short and compact, Megan is lean, long, and at this age learning to negotiate with all of these inches that turned up so fast. She’s all angles as she folds herself up into an armchair with her bright red yarn on her lap and a set of double-pointed needles in her hand.

When Megan knits, it looks like digging. Her left needle lies over her palm, fingers below and thumb on top, the needle held between her thumb and pointer finger as though it were a tiny and effective shovel. Her right hand completes the picture of industry, this hand position almost mirroring the other, her thumbs pointed toward each other, as though she were ready to
toss a miniscule salad rather than start a pair of mittens. When she begins to knit her left hand remains largely still, simply holding the needle and stitches as they wait to be knit. Only her left thumb moves, stroking the next stitch of the round forward to the needle tips. Megan’s right hand is the big action hand, and stitch in place, thumb on top of the needle, index finger curled beneath, Meg digs the right needle into the first stitch with emphasis, right hand already flicking around the needle to wrap the yarn around and back.

Even at sixteen, the movements of knitting have been repeated so many times that Meg looks comfortable. Her hands move sure and quick and repeat her own personal knitting series so quickly that I know that someday she will knit faster than me; in fact, sometimes her dad suggests that she already does, just to bug me. As I watch her, she looks away from her knitting and watches TV, then laughs with her sister and looks over her shoulder, all while her hands beaver away in a steady, even, almost effortless string. I’m marveling at what this daughter of mine can do, how she was this tiny baby and now she knits socks without thinking, when she drops a stitch, or maybe splits it, and she glances down, stops the automatic nature of her knitting entirely dead, and is frozen as she tries to diagnose the trouble.

It takes a long time, and Meg hunches over her work, poking at things with a long finger, and it’s only in this moment of difficulty that I can see any evidence of her lack of experience. A frown crosses her brow as she ever so slowly diagnoses what
might have gone wrong. I resist the impulse to say “Oh, give it to me,” because I know I could fix it in a second, and after what seems like forever, Megan finally sees her trouble stitch, and then abruptly she’s a wee girl again. Arms akimbo, sticking her tongue out while she retrieves the runaway, awkwardly lifting and moving the needles just like she suddenly finds them unwieldy, long oars, and then, suddenly everything is on track again, she’s back to what she knows, and like someone flipped a switch on her labeled “knit,” Megan’s off at full speed again, fingers flying without a single thought given to the fact that it was her speed that dropped the stitch in the first place.

This small example is the thing about teenagers that makes me crazy, the thing about them that makes everybody crazy. Speed. Either the kid isn’t moving fast enough, or she’s moving too much, not slowing down to think about what’s happening or what the consequences are or even what’s going on. There’s a certain whiplash in being the parent of a teenager, where you have to find a way not to scream like a berzerker every time the kid slows down to the pace of a snail on sedatives, and ten minutes later you’re following them around the house saying, “Hold on a minute. Why are you taking the cordless drill to the park?” or “I know you’re excited, but have you considered that this rodeo plan of yours might be a little dangerous?” or “Okay, maybe your teacher is a moron, but is it a good idea to antagonize a moron in charge?” It’s a beautiful thing to watch (should the process leave you with enough clear thought for analysis)
because this slowing down and speeding up is evidence of what we all want for our kids—the ability to learn—and done right, this teenaged quickstep turns into the more reliable steadiness of adulthood.

It took about twenty years of parenting (eighteen, actually, but I did several kids at once for extra credit) to come to understand that it isn’t really the slowing down and speeding up that is driving me crazy with my teenagers. Speed is a symptom of the terrifying truth beneath. I want my kids to even out and quit driving me bonkers with this stuff because on some level I know that the lack of steadiness reflects a lack of solid priorities or a reliable sense of their responsibilities, and that’s scary as hell for the grownups watching.

If a kid can’t slow down enough to see danger or can’t speed up enough to get out of its way, then she isn’t safe on her own yet, and yet she is old enough that everything demands that I start letting go and sending this kid, the same kid who just informed me that piercing your belly button is “normal” and “everyone but her” has done it (call me crazy, but I think “everyone” might be an overstatement), out into the big world alone, where she can make even bigger mistakes and get anything she wants pierced. My husband has a little sign in his office that says, “Quick, hire a teenager while they still know everything,” and that’s the bigger part of the trouble. You have this kid who’s speeding up and slowing down at seemingly random moments, working hard to solidify priorities and morals
that are still developing, and the kid has no idea. Not only does the kid think that she has all the answers, but she thinks that you, as an adult and a parent, are a great big wanking idiot who is to be ignored at all costs.

Any normal parent placed in this position is going to want to do one thing, but unfortunately, building a cage in the basement to house your teen until she grows a brain is illegal. I’ve settled on something else. I’m letting go of Meg as much as I can, while simultaneously looking for evidence in her behavior that shows me that she’s growing up, is getting a clue, and is going to be okay in the long run. With Megan’s older sister, Amanda, it was that she played the violin. There was something about seeing my teenager play in an orchestra that was so stunning and civilized that I found it almost impossible to reconcile the young woman so poised on the stage with the mouthy kid who broke curfew the day before. Even though she had blue stripes in her hair, as she drew the bow across her instrument all I could think was that she was going to be all right. All the worry, angst, and concern I had for this teenager could slip away, if only for three minutes. If a kid can do this incredible thing and do it so well, then I just can’t believe that she could grow up to be a bad person. When I find something like that, I cling to it like a life raft.

Last week, without discussing it with me, Megan went down to the yarn shop at the end of the street and bought a skein of bright red, chunky baby alpaca. It was $17, and she bought it with her own money. She brought it home, asked me (who was
just about stunned senseless) if she could use my ball winder and swift, and then began to knit red mittens. As a mother, I couldn’t have asked for a better sign, since I feel absolutely sure that she cannot have a secret drinking or drug habit and be spending $17 on alpaca. It has to mean something, doesn’t it?

This proof, these moments that we parents can cling to like life rafts, has to be why I really like watching Meg knit. There are moments, for sure, where Meg is knitting too fast and risking a mistake, and there are moments when the sloth lurking inside every teen takes over and she problem solves at the rate of a two-year-old who missed naptime, but mostly my Meg knits at an even, constant speed that belies her stop-and-start nature and the fickle aspects of her adolescent pacing. Everything that teenagers are—unruly, unfinished, too slow or too fast, too stupid or too smart, the way they know everything and have to reinvent the wheel all the time—all of that is absent in Meg when she knits. When Meg is knitting she is neither rushing nor dawdling, hurried nor absent. She is pure forward, effective movement, her body and hands doing nothing that is unnecessary. All of her is productive, and confident, and steady, and sure. All of her is beautiful. All of her is adult.

Megan’s knitting is a hint, a window on her future, a crazy sneak preview of the sort of woman that she will be, should we survive each other, all crystallized in this one perfect moment when I watch my Megan knit an extraordinary pair of warm, red, $17 mittens.

If you live in Canada, it’s incredible what happens in the spring. You would expect part of it. The part where the snow melts and the birds come home and tulips and pussywillows appear from out of nowhere, that’s to be expected and doesn’t really come as a surprise to us Northern types. Despite the death of hope when it’s still freezing in March, we do believe that spring will eventually come. Spring, and with it the liberation of just tossing on a sweater if you need to go outside, the quiet relief that it’s finally warmed up enough that if you lose your keys you won’t be killed by exposure while you’re looking for them, all of that you expect. What I never expect is the sudden plethora of surprises in your neighborhood and among your neighbors.

All winter long people are in their homes, sequestered from the cold. We don’t stand on the sidewalk and talk to our neighbors, we don’t chat on the porch in the evening. If we do happen to catch a glimpse of each other, we’re all so bundled up that
unless you can see what house someone goes into, you might not even be able to tell who they are. (I spent one whole winter thinking that a neighbor was having an affair with a strange man until I bumped into him while salting the sidewalk. It was her husband. He just had a new coat.) We are wearing hats, scarves, sweaters, coats, extra socks, gloves, and mittens, layer after layer of clothing. It renders people pretty indistinguishable from each other, unless you happen to recognize their knitwear. (One of my daughters got busted for skipping school in mid-January when she was identified at a distance—and with a scarf obscuring her face—because she was wearing a handknit hat that the rat who finked on her recognized as my work.)

There is a chance you will get a look at a neighbor around the holidays, but frankly we’re still wearing a lot of layers against the bitter Canadian cold, and there are many months of winter after December. Suddenly, spring comes, the world peels a layer off, and all of us are stunned to discover winter secrets. The woman who moved in next door in February is actually a guy named Rick, or maybe your neighbor Bob takes off his coat, and holy cow, he’s lost twenty pounds over the winter. (Or gained them, which is a little more common with the holidays and hibernation in there.) Children are taller, teen boys have grown whiskers, teen girls have sprouted figures, everyone’s hair is longer, and in my personal favorite, you discover the woman you’ve been talking to at the elementary school every single morning for five months when you drop off your kid has
had a big secret under her parka. She’s eight months pregnant, and whammo, you need a baby sweater, or booties, or something, and you need it fast. The winter has robbed you of the traditional several months of warning. If you’ve got a reputation as a knitter who shells out the good stuff when a baby is born, you’ve got problems. Problems that you can’t outknit.