The Knit and Purl of Motherhood

Motherhood is so much like knitting, it’s a wonder women aren’t presented with a pair of needles in the delivery room.  Or, that babies aren’t popped into canvas totes along with the makings of the first scarf.

There is never a time in a knitter’s life when the thread runs out.  The next project, a new design, technique or colorway summons us even before we have woven in the loose ends of the current hour.

Isn’t this just like motherhood?  Even as we watch our darlings learn to stand, and then tumble, to speak and then to argue with us, to run and then to run away into their own bright and beckoning futures, aren’t we mothers trying to keep up – with ever more skillful capacities at keeping a loving distance, our needles working on some garment or Christmas gift, our stitching a way for us to keep the thread of connection unbroken even though it stretch halfway around the world?

I have been knitting quite a bit during these stay-at-home weeks, drawing close to those comforts that have served me so well in the past.  I know other mothers doing the same, because we are sharing photos and patterns and links to extravagant yarn sites to keep our spirits up.  It is one of the languages of womanhood — with or without children.

I’ve recently finished a sweater and while I await delivery of yet another 10 skeins, I head to the reading chair in my office to call to mind a project undertaken many years ago, when my son was quite young.  I had far fewer resources of solitude and time then; in a way, I was more desperate for both of these, as doubtless mothers with children at home in this time are now.  It gave my creative work with yarn greater urgency and edge.

I’d fallen in love with spinning a few years earlier.  Somehow in the course of things, I’d met an extraordinary woman who ran a small sheep farm in the country close to the western limits of Cambridge. Eccentric, brilliant, canny, she’d allowed me to visit her as she spun one sunny winter afternoon in her kitchen overlooking the sheep pens. At her feet lay an entire fleece from one of her flock.  We drank tea and talked by the warmth of her wood-burning stove.  I took in her collection of animal skulls, her two-toned mittens, and the freshly spun skeins hanging by the stove to dry.

I left that afternoon totally smitten, without any tools to my name except a small drop spindle, and with the unwashed fleece I’d purchased on impulse as I walked out the door.  I brought it home, to learn how to spin my own yarn.

It mattered not a fig that I hadn’t knit in years, had no one to knit for at the time other than myself.   I read and practiced, spoke to practitioners, visited with other spinners, attended meetings of the area’s Spinner’s Guild, until in time I had sufficiently mastered the art and craft of spinning, and had amassed a quantity of earth-toned Bluefaced Leicester skeins.  My goal achieved, I set them aside and life went on.

Then one day I found myself knitting small sweaters for a beautiful little boy.  Lots of sweaters.  In those early years, knitting felt the way writing poetry had felt when I was an undergraduate and in love.  The stitches, patterns, buttons, cables, patches were just a different version of stanzas, metaphors, figures of speech.  Knitting became one of the great sacraments of motherhood, and I counted myself something of an evangelist.  It was a joy to produce each piece, a colorful and living emblem of my love.  Raw fiber transformed into objects of use and beauty.

In time I came to understand that the business of mothering was a long-distance adventure, not a series of sprints.  I felt that I needed to express this reality in a piece of knitting that wasn’t an article of clothing destined for the cedar chest, but that would always stand for the unique quality that only marriage or a life vow comes close to replicating — a dailiness composed of small, humble gestures, often unnoticed, never-ending, but always shot through with faithfulness and steady, patient love, even when — or especially when — it seems to ask of us the impossible…

I pulled out the earth-colored wool I’d spun years earlier, and began to knit.  I cast on 45 stitches, too wide for a scarf, too narrow for a shawl, but just right on my size 8 needles.  In odd moments over the next few years, I worked on this piece, a few rows at a time. Then life would happen and I’d set it down, only to pick it up again. The yarn, as no doubt my mothering efforts, was full of the lumps and bumps, the thick and thin inconsistencies of a first-time spinner.  It was coarse, raw and made no efforts to fancy itself up with sophisticated tricks.  It was resolutely homespun.

In time, I came to the end of the yarn.  My son was well into high school by then.  Slowly, and with gratitude for each stitch I’d knit on the piece over many years, I cast off, until I arrived at the last stitch.  This one I couldn’t bring myself to tie off, to finish the piece.  I left it with a needle holding it live, resting on my chair.  I knew that I would never finish it, any more than I’d finish with motherhood.  I left it draped it thus for a few more years, so that I could see it every day, long after my son had left the house and moved into his life.   It comforts me in its forthright simple sincerity.  No one but me would even notice it, it is so ordinary.  But to me it evokes every moment of the years, and the work of ineffable value threaded through them.  Were it art, instead of an emblem of my life, I’d name it, “Motherlove.”