Free-Range Knitter (16 page)

Joe’s client drove me up to the place, lit a fire in the woodstove, showed me around a bit, and split. The moment he left, I was giddy. Giddy and truthfully, a little bit scared. Not only was I more alone and isolated than I have ever been in my life,
I had also, as my mother said, left all my excuses at home. If I couldn’t write in that environment, there would be nobody to blame but myself. She was right, and I found that one of the most frightening things I had ever heard, but sort of inspiring. After all, it was in my best interest to write well and prolifically while I was up there so that on my return I could continue to blame Joe and the children for all my problems and avoid any personal responsibility.

It didn’t take long for it to work. Deprived of a TV, a radio, company, and other places to go, I was soon bored and lonely enough that I was writing. I was writing a lot. I was writing to entertain myself, to pass the time, to keep a record of what it was like to be in that place. I wrote all the time. After a few days, though, I was surprised to notice a shocking side effect. I wasn’t knitting.

Let me rephrase that. I wasn’t knitting much. (I don’t know if it’s strictly possible for me to go cold turkey.) I was writing and going for hikes in the woods and meandering in the snow. I was communing with deer and keeping an eye out for bobcat. When I wasn’t out traipsing around listening to trees and negotiating the huge amounts of snow, I was back in the house, tending the fire, cooking for myself, and writing, writing, writing.

The more I wrote, the less I knit, and it wasn’t just a matter of time or feasibility, although there is an obvious problem in not being able to physically knit and type at the same time. I wasn’t called to it. I didn’t need it (much). Generally, I carve several
hours out of my day to knit. I knit while waiting, talking, watching TV. I knit on the bus, while I’m on the phone—all the time. At the house in the woods I just didn’t have a lot of those things. There was no TV. I wasn’t waiting for a bus. There was no downtime, and furthermore, nobody was around to piss me off or annoy me. I’ve always known that I use knitting to take the edge off of difficult people or situations, and at the cabin I didn’t need the edge taken off of anything. As though to confirm this, I noticed that the only time I really wanted to knit was in the evening, when the night closed in all around that place in the woods, the dark pressed up close to the windows, and things got a little bit creepy.

I have long struggled with the question of whether knitting is truly creative. Creativity is usually defined as the generation of ideas, whether it’s for art or science or what have you. When you are creative, you’re relying on your own brain to come up with answers, solutions, and concepts. In this way, creativity can be found in parenting, plumbing, painting, baking, or even some of knitting. I say “some of knitting” because not all knitting is creative, using the traditional definition. The generation of the idea is creative, and so may be choosing your colors and coming up with your plan. We creatively problem solve in knitting all the time, but the act itself, actual knitting, that’s not tremendously creative. That’s execution. Once you have the figuring done, or when you’re following someone else’s pattern, the knitting part of making something just can’t be defined as
creative, can it? When I think of the process of a plain sock, knit a number of times until it’s rote, I’m thinking of the tens of thousands of stitches it takes to finish that sock. When you’re just executing knit or purl stitches, repeating them thousands of times, can the physical process of knitting that 96,890th stitch really be considered creative?

The interesting thing I seemed to be learning at the cabin is that the answer seemed like it might be “yes.” It was as if I had a set amount that I needed to create each day, and that need could be met by either knitting or writing. If it was turning out that the need to knit was filled by writing, a complex creative process, then mustn’t that mean that knitting is, too? I was stunned to discover that they could stand in for each other. (I shouldn’t have been. I have known for a long time that knitting is my favorite procrastination to fill hours I should be writing.) If both could satisfy the same urge, then they must be the same sort of process, but (I hate it when I argue with myself) they aren’t the same. Writing is pulling a new and thoughtful idea from nowhere, and unless you’re also designing, knitting is mostly execution. What my common sense was telling me and what my experience was showing me really weren’t matching up. That happens to me a lot, and it usually means I’m wrong about something. (I’m wrong a lot, too.)

On a long tramp through the woods, I got to thinking about it. If I was getting a result that didn’t make sense, then maybe I was starting with the wrong base premise. I stood in
a snowbank as realization swept over me like a tidal wave. I was thinking too narrowly. Surely knitting and writing both met other needs, needs beyond my need to be creative. They were multitaskers, doing more than one thing, fulfilling more than one purpose. The same way that a glass of milk is both good food and good drink, knitting and writing must be serving another function. Standing there, with the snow melting through my boots, thinking about going back in the house and making either socks or a book, I got it.

It was so simple that I was almost ashamed that it had taken all day to put it together. Knitting wasn’t always about creativity, and neither was writing; it was about creation, bringing something into being. Making a thing where there wasn’t something before. When I was writing, I was coming up with an idea, and then using my skills to make it a reality. Same thing with knitting. I was imagining a sweater, or socks or whatever, and then using my skills to translate that image in my mind into a real thing you could touch and see. I had been right (and rather wrong) the whole time. They were the same, they fed the same human need, they enriched the soul the same way. They were not an act of creativity, they were a pure act of creation.

Who knew. To your spiritual self, writing a novel may be exactly the same as knitting a sweater.

The lady on the phone seems to have no idea that she has said something completely insane, so I wonder whether I heard her right. “Can you repeat that?” I ask, trying to keep the fear out of my voice and to ignore the sound of blood rushing rapidly out of my head, which seems to be interfering with my hearing.

“I’d like you to teach a knitting class at my toy store,” she repeats. “There will be about eight kids between five and nine years old. Can you do it?”

Now, that’s what I thought she said, and she doesn’t seem to think that it’s fundamentally crazy, so for reasons that I still can’t explain and are completely against my better judgment, I agree.

The minute I hang up the phone I regret the decision, which was not really a decision but a crappy defense against a precision surgical strike. I am one of those people who will agree to just about anything if you ask me directly, and I have a feeling that this woman knew it. Not only do I know that I meant to say
“no” when I actually said “yes,” I also know that this toy shop owner has burned through three decent upstanding knitting teachers before me, including a friend of mine who is such a good teacher that it’s likely that she could teach your cat to not just use the toilet, but to use toilet paper, wash her paws, and flush afterward. Knowing this, I should have said “no.”

I imagined what it would be like to teach knitting to that many kids. In truth, I wondered a whole bunch of things, and since I had never taught even one kid to knit, I wondered whether my imaginings of total chaos were going to be that far off the mark. I phoned a friend and told her what I had agreed to do, and hung up when she still hadn’t stopped giggling helplessly through an entire cup of coffee. This cemented my belief that if I escaped from this experience (eight kids? in one room?) without being tied to a chair with my own yarn and needles, I was going to think I had done pretty well.

I think that this toy-store owner, the one who had roped me into this, had gathered some empirical evidence and decided I was a good mark because all my children knit. (I also think she was running out of knitting teachers who were not wise to her scheme, but I digress.) On the surface, that would make it seem as if I was a good person to teach kids to knit—after all, I managed to produce three knitters out of three ordinary children—but the truth is, I didn’t teach my kids to knit. Nobody did; they were the product of a complicated, multiyear, knitting, learning experiment.

In the 1980s the whole language approach to learning to read became popular. In essence, proponents of whole language believed (and I am oversimplifying here) that you didn’t need to teach a kid to read at all. They believed that reading and writing would occur naturally in children when they were ready, simply by involving them adequately with language. Reading to them, showing them writing, generating learning opportunities from a rich literate world around them was supposed to grow readers and writers out of kids, and for the most part those proponents were right. Exposed to enough language sources, kids did learn to read and write, although opting out of traditional language rules meant that they were weaker in some areas than in others. Whole language kids tend to be crappy spellers, for instance.

If immersing your kids in language could make them readers, I wondered, what would happen if you immersed your kids in knitting? Would they learn? Would they accept it as “something Mum did,” or would they think it was something everyone did and therefore take it up themselves? Would they come to accept that knitting was just what people did while they watched TV and feel empty and sort of itchy if they had come of knitting age and their hands weren’t busy? I devised a plan. Step one was to have some kids. That was pretty easy. I was able to make them from materials found around the home, although it did take some time. Once I had procured the children, I began my endeavor, immersing them in knitting during their formative years.

I knit without cease during this crucial time. I knit them blankets while I was pregnant. I knit while I was in labor. (Useful tip: It is time to call the midwife if you can no longer knit two together without arsing it up.) I knit while they lay nursing on my lap, I knit while they were in the bath. I knit in the park, I knit at playgroups. I knit while they sat on my lap and told me stories, and I knit through temper tantrums (theirs and mine). I even sacrificed fun and empowering experiences such as vacuuming and scrubbing the toilet to free up more knitting time. Inasmuch as it was possible, I put down the knitting only to administer first aid and hugs and to read to them. (It was insurance for the whole language thing. I didn’t want to raise a whack of illiterate knitters, even if they were very good knitters. If nothing else, they would need communication skills to search for patterns and yarn on the Internet.)

I swathed my children in knitwear. (Luckily, we are Canadian. This program would have been a little harder to pull off, bordering on cruel, if we had lived in Mexico City.) I made them hats and mittens; they wore wool soakers over their cloth diapers. I wrapped them in woolen blankets and knit cotton sun hats. (That was my concession to our brief summer.) In the immortal words of Elizabeth Zimmermann, I immunized them against the itchiness of wool by starting with the softest, buttery baby yarns and working up to coarser Aran wool. I strategically placed significant knitting books and patterns around the house, and I made sure they understood the importance
of handmade things—not just knitted but crafted in any way. To help them understand the value of human time and effort, I implemented “Find Your Own Food Fridays” as soon as they were old enough to make a cheese sandwich. (Feel free to take any of these ideas for your very own. We parents have to stick together.) I put small but beautiful baskets of yarn and needles in their rooms in case they were inspired. I let them use yarn for anything they wanted. Sure, the other mums thought I was odd. Sure, they thought I was a slacker with a messy house who took her kids to the park for hours just so she could sit and knit, but they didn’t understand the grand plan. They didn’t know about the experiment. (They were still finding value in housework. I had evolved.)

I knit. I made more babies (three in total) at respectable intervals … and I waited, and I waited.

As with all gradual processes, there was not a eureka moment. I do not recall the moment that any of them learned to knit; in fact, there is a very good chance I wasn’t present at the time. One morning, when my eldest daughter was about five, she asked me for some wool. I supplied it (you cannot withhold the building blocks of a woolly education) and asked what she was going to do with it. “Knit another dolly blanket,” she replied. “I used up my bedroom wool.” And off she went. I staggered. I was agog. Another dolly blanket? Another?

I followed the miss into her room and sure enough, there was a piece of knitting. It was not a good piece of knitting, I
can’t say that. I know that this would be just the most perfect story ever if the blanket she had knit was even and beautiful, but it wasn’t. It was lumpy. It had stitches that came and went. It appeared that she had cast on by simply winding her yarn around the needle (turns out that works, by the way) and she had cast off by simply pulling the yarn through the stitches at the top in a straight line. None of this, of course, was the point at all. She had knit. This first charming clever girl of mine, only five years old and with no help from anyone, she had knit.

It was a triumphant moment for me. Truly great. I had created a knitter, and an intuitive and clever one at that. It was as though, in that moment, I had reached some sort of a zenith, as a mother and as a knitter, and I was genuinely happy. (It took a while before it hit me that making a bunch of people who wanted my yarn was not going to be a good move for me, but I digress again.)

Years went by, and my other two children spontaneously learned to knit as well. All three of my children suddenly became knitters around the same time that they learned to read. While this sounds remarkable, that children could learn something without being taught, remember that this is how children learn almost everything. Talking, singing, walking, and running, children learn these things, mostly, even if their parents are raving incompetents. (I don’t know about other mothers, but I find that very reassuring.)