Yarn Harlot

by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

  I fear for her future, I really do. If knitting is “boring” then what’s it going to take to hold her interest? Hitchhiking? Spearheading a revolution? Dropping acid? (Do kids still drop acid? That’s something I should probably find out, now that my very own flesh and blood is talking about not knitting.) It’s a slippery slope, I tell you. First you tell your mother that knitting is “boring” and next something horrible has happened, like drug addiction, not folding your laundry, or (God forbid!) deciding wool is “itchy.”

  Ms. Daring Designer, since you are the foremost knitting authority in the world right now and since it says right on the back of your book that your patterns are “too funky for any kid to resist,” I ask you: What’s a mother to do with a resister?

  Yours truly,

  Stephanie

  Parents and Knitters

  The top ten ways why being a parent is like being a knitter:

  You have to work on something for a really long time before you know if it’s going to be okay.

  They both involve an act of creation involving common materials, easily found around the home.

  Both knitting and parenting are more pleasant if you have the occasional glass of wine, but go right down the drain if you start up with a lot of tequila or shooters.

  With either one, you can start with all the right materials, use all the best reference books available, really apply yourself, and still get completely unexpected results.

  No matter whether you decided to become a parent or a knitter, you are still going to end up with something you have to hand wash.

  Parents and knitters both have to learn new things all the time, mostly so that they can give someone else something.

  Both activities are about tension. In knitting, the knitter has control of the amount of tension on the object in progress. In parenting, the opposite is true.

  No matter how much time you spend at knitting or parenting, you are still going to wish you could spend all your time at it. Which is odd, since both activities are occasionally frustrating enough that you want to gnaw your own arm off.

  Knitting and parenting are both about endurance. Most of the time it’s just mundane repetitive labor, until one day, you realize you’re actually making something sort of neat.

  One day, you will wake up and realize that you are spending hours and hours working at something that is costing you a fortune, won’t ever pay the bills, creates laundry and clutters up your house, and won’t ever really be finished … and the only thing you will think about it is that you can’t wait to get home and do more.

  Is This a Test?

  If it is true, and I really believe that it is, that knitting is a soothing force in the world and that the liberal application of yarn can ease any day, then today would be a time when I tested it.

  2:47 I have been on call to go to the birth of a baby for almost three weeks. The baby is a week overdue, and the mother lives about an hour from here, so I’ve got some concerns about getting there quickly when the baby finally starts to come. My birth bag is packed and I’ve chosen the project that I’ll knit while I’m at the hospital. I’m very, very ready to go and maybe a little jumpy, so when my pager goes off at 2:47, I ricochet out of bed, smash my head on the dresser, and try to read my pager as I jam my legs into my jeans. Of course I can’t read it in the dark. Only one baby is due, and only my clients use my pager. I don’t want to wake Joe, so I ram my noisy pager into my pocket, pull a sweatshirt over my head, and leave the bedroom with mismatched (but hand-knit) socks. I brush my teeth while mentally running through my checklist. Someone to watch the kids, food in the fridge, other commitments to cancel… I run down the stairs and note the time, only two minutes have elapsed. I am a star.

  2:51 I can’t find the phone to return the page. I find my knitting and client file while I am looking, and after several moments of deepening panic (during which it doesn’t occur to me to use the other phone), I locate the cordless phone in the basement on top of the dryer. Its battery is completely dead. This is nobody’s fault but my own. The fact that the phone was on the dryer means that it was me who left it there. I can be quite certain about this because nobody else in the house even knows where the dryer is.

  2:55 I run to the other phone, putting my bag by the door as I go and stringing together expletives. I reach into my pocket, pull out my pager to dial back the number and …

  It is a 1-800 number. It is pager spam. I am up, dressed, and at my front door at 2:55 in the morning for pager advertising spam.

  3:00 I am back in bed, delirious and exhausted but too enraged to sleep. I lie there for quite some time imagining revenge fantasies and composing long and hostile speeches that I will give to the pager people when day breaks.

  5:30 Megan’s alarm clock goes off. I stagger into her room to shut it off when she doesn’t. Megan offers no explanation for why her alarm is set for 5:30, but does ask me why I am sleeping topless in a pair of jeans. I have no answer. On the way out of the room I step in an art project that Sam left on the floor and I hop to the bathroom to wash the wet paint off my foot.

  5:40 Sam’s alarm reports loudly. Megan shuts it off. I try to sleep, but am jolted awake by the thought that the children clearly had some kind of activity planned between 5:30 and 5:40 that was important enough to have a double alarm system.

  6:15 The cat wakes me up by licking my nose. I lock the cat out of the bedroom. Nose licking will not be tolerated.

  6:27 I let the cat in. It turns out that I would rather have nose licking than incessant cat whining. I am feeling increasingly unloved.

  7:30 My alarm goes off. I get up (and hit my head on the dresser again … I swear in the name of all things woolly that Joe is moving it around while I’m out of the bed). I rouse the children and go to the kitchen to start coffee and school lunches. I notice that someone has left the milk out overnight, making cold cereal impossible, so I start oatmeal.

  7:34 While beginning to make sandwiches, I see that the bread has been gnawed by a mouse (likely while the cat was licking my nose). I resist the urge to use the bread anyway and make pita pizzas for the girls to take to school. As I put them in the oven I notice that I’m thinking about leaving. I don’t know where on earth I would go, but I’m thinking about leaving.

  7:45 Note to the Toronto Public School Board: I am as big a hockey fan as anybody. It turns my little Canadian crank that our women’s hockey team kicked American arse. If, however, you decide to have a “Red and White Day” to celebrate, I would like you to send some kind of note home so that I get more than twenty minutes to clothe an enthusiastic ten-year-old girl who will not accept compromises (like cream and burgundy) in red and white clothing.

  8:01 Locate Sam’s red pants in Megan’s drawer. Spend five minutes breaking up the fight that ensues. Deal with Megan’s emotional reaction to Sam’s accusation of pants theft. Deal with Sam’s emotional reaction to Megan’s denial.

  8:11 After defusing the situation, I decide not to tell the children that it was probably me committing laundry error. I remind the children that when it comes to misplaced laundry, ownership is not nine-tenths of the law. Feel briefly guilty for that, but am distracted by the smoke alarm.

  8:12 Remove immolated pita pizzas from oven. Curse loudly. Curse even more loudly when I notice that there are pita pizzas on the counter that I made last night before I went to bed. Weep a little.

  8:17 Amanda leaves. Note that she forgot her lunch, chase her down the street. Return home, note that she forgot her sheet music for orchestra, chase her even further down the street.

  8:23 Amanda is back. She tells me that it is “Striped Sock Day” at her school. I resist the urge to choke her with a pair of striped socks, and instead hand them to her without comment. I decide that it is cruel to have high schools declare a different spirit day than elementary schools. I make a mental note to send viciously worded e-mail to my Member of Parliament later in the day addressing this very issue.

  8:25 In a preemptive
strike, I ask Megan (who goes to middle school and therefore completes my “three children/three schedules” set) if there is any sort of “day” that I should know about. Red and white? Socks? Waffles? Smile to self when Megan replies, “Screw it.”

  8:30 Walk Sam to school. Feel a thrill of success when I manage to avoid a PTA type who looks like she needs a volunteer … (I actually like this lady, but I’m antisocial before coffee.) Then I accidentally run myself into a lowhanging tree branch while fleeing from her. (Subtle. I’m sure she never saw me.)

  8:40 Return home. Get my coffee and sit to knit, relieved that the worst is over. Reach for my knitting pattern and discover that the cat has exacted her revenge for being locked out of the bedroom (however briefly) by depositing a hairball on my pattern notes. They are illegible, which is really just fine, because there is absolutely no way that I am even entertaining a suggestion of how to wash cat puke off a pattern. We’ll just call it a loss. I reach for my sock in progress instead and drink coffee, glorious brown elixir of life.

  9:00 Spend a few minutes peacefully working around and around on my knitting, reflecting that there are really very few things in the world as peaceful, predictable, and worthwhile as turning a ball of yarn into a pair of socks with only coffee for company. I feel the trials I’ve endured since 2:47 A.M. slip away as the yarn slides between my fingers, forming reliable stitch after stitch. Knitting, they say, lowers blood pressure, relieves stress, and can be a form of active meditation, and I really believe it. This is the first time that I’ve felt relaxed all morning.

  I believe every moment of it, until 9:05.

  When my pager goes off.

  DPN

  This is getting stupid,” said Joe. I glared at him with white-hot fury and resisted the urge to say something completely sarcastic in return. I’d been married long enough to know that good relationships depend just as much on what doesn’t get said as on what does. There are these moments when you have a choice about what you say to your spouse. You can choose to say something like “Really, Joe? Really? You freaking think so?” or you can choose to say nothing. Given that what was going down in our driveway had passed “getting stupid” about an hour before Joe’s comment, I decided that keeping my mouth shut was probably much, much better. The situation was now officially stupid; in fact, it was way past stupid and cruising at a thousand miles an hour toward moronic. It would soon reach unprecedented levels of ludicrous.

  The stupidity in the driveway was the kind of stupidity that my children would tell their children about, and their children would pass the story down through generations upon generations. I knew perfectly well that I was giving my children ammunition for those times when people began telling stories that start, “And you think your mom was wacko?” I could feel the stupid, but I couldn’t stop myself.

  I was crawling around the backseat of a rental car. I had been crawling around the inside of the car for over an hour, looking for a lost double-pointed needle. I knew it was there. We had just returned from a long car trip, and I had been knitting all the way. Six hours in the car: I knit the whole time and I had all four needles. When we got back to Toronto, we decided that since we had a little time to spare, we would drop our daughters and our luggage off at the house and then drive over and return the rental car before they charged us for an extra day. It was a great plan … until I noticed, as I got out of the car, that I had only three needles.

  It seemed like a simple problem. When I was in the car I had four needles. Now, without leaving the car, I had three. Ergo, the missing needle must be in the car. Could anything be more obvious?

  When I first noticed that the needle was missing, there was absolutely no indication that this was going to get stupid. I checked my knitting bag. I checked my purse. I checked the car floor. Then I got out of the car and checked my seat. Nothing. I rechecked all of those places and then got down on my knees on the sidewalk and looked under the seat. Nothing. I started to think creatively. In the map slot on the side of the door? No. Maybe the needle was on my lap, and when I stood up to get out of the car, it fell on the road. I got out of the car and looked on the curb and in the gutter. Two of my neighbors walked by and said hi to Joe as I flattened myself on the sidewalk so that I could see under the car. They didn’t say anything to me. This should have been my first hint that things were getting stupid.

  Joe stood by the front door watching me grovel on the sidewalk. I could see him trying to weigh his options. Did he have a better chance of returning the rental car on time if he suggested that I let the needle go (thus possibly provoking a fight) or if he took the needle loss seriously and helped me try and find it (thus condoning, and perhaps furthering, my insane behavior)? Joe decided to split the difference: He helped me look for the needle while suggesting I let go. “Maybe it’s stuck in your clothes?” he suggested. “Maybe it stuck on you for a few moments and then fell out, like, over here?” Joe walked the route I took from the car to the house.

  “Maybe,” I said, crawling behind him. It’s a 2-millimeter needle. I wasn’t going to find it unless I stuck close to the ground. “Maybe it’s in this crack?” I squinted down the crevice between the step and the porch.

  “That would be bad luck.”

  “Yeah,” I said, still lying on the ground, peering down into the crack trying to see into the tiny blackness.

  “You might not get it back if it’s in there,” Joe offered. “Maybe we could just return the car and look in the crack when we get back? I could get the magnet. I’d help you, you know, after we return the car.”

  I turned my head and looked at him. He wasn’t getting this at all. The needle might be in the car. If we returned the car, I’d never get the needle back. Never.

  I loved those needles. They are super sharp aluminum needles, bright blue. I understand that they’re commonplace in the United States, but here in Canada, they are rare and special. It’s not that they are the best needles in the world—we aren’t talking $20 Addis Turbo here. When you first get them the tips aren’t completely smooth, and after a while the blue rubs off the tips and they can get a bit rough. But the needle that the rental car had eaten was in the perfect middle stage. I’d nursed it through its imperfect infancy and now it had at least a couple of socks left in it before it was past its prime. I loved it. It was mine. Besides, it was part of a set of four. If I lost one, the other three were useless.

  I looked at Joe as if he had two heads. He’d lived with a knitter for this long and now he had suggested that I just give up on the needle? The dude could forget returning the rental car until I got my needle back. I shot him a look that I hoped expressed this sentiment. I’m pretty sure that he got the message, since he started to help me look again.

  “Are you sure it’s not in your purse?” Joe tried to think. (He also tried to hold a conversation with me that didn’t reflect his belief that I was a ripping lunatic. I appreciated that.) “I know you didn’t put the sock in your purse but maybe the needle was on your lap and when you were getting out of the car it fell off your lap into your purse?” Joe looked so hopeful that I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I’d already practically shredded my purse. I began to check it again, dumping the entire contents onto the sidewalk. Joe started to go over the car again. As he yanked the floor mats free and I scattered my belongings, he tried again.

  “Steph, if the car isn’t back in half an hour it will cost fifty dollars. Can we agree that we should return the car before it costs fifty dollars?”

  “Keep looking, Joe.”

  “Steph…”

  “It’s one of my blue ones. Keep looking.”

  We searched in silence for a little while. Then our neighbor emerged from his house.

  “Hi, guys, whatcha lose?”

  “Steph’s lost a knitting needle and she doesn’t want to return the rental until she finds it.” Joe’s voice was beginning to have a little edge of bitterness, and I resented it. He could just have said that I was looking for a need
le. He didn’t need to drag the whole rental thing into it … The neighbor looked for a while, but when I suggested that perhaps we needed to get some tools to remove the seats of the rental car to look properly, he remembered he had a dentist appointment he had to start brushing his teeth for. The vague air of bitterness that Joe had begun to exude was becoming stronger. His brow was furrowed, and he kept checking his watch.

  “Steph, in twenty minutes they are going to charge us fifty dollars.”

  I pretended that I couldn’t hear him because my head was under the backseat of the car.

  “Steph?” For the love of wool. He wasn’t going to give up.

  “Joe, it’s one of my favorite needles. I want it, I know it is here and I’m having it. There’s just no stinking way that I’m leaving it behind.”

  “I thought the green ones were your favorites? Just last week you said that the green ones were the best you ever had. You’re just saying that the blue ones are your favorites because that’s the one that’s missing.” He was practically gritting his teeth while he looked through the luggage again. I resisted the urge to sigh. I am so misunderstood as an artist.

  “The green ones were good last week, then they got old. Now the blue ones are my favorites. For crying out loud, Joe, if something of yours was lost we wouldn’t even be talking about it.” This was a stupid thing to say. If I have learned one thing about marital discord it is that one must never, ever attempt to make equivalent arguments. I know (and you know) that if Joe had lost his favorite whatchamacallit in the car, he would be flipping out and we would have gotten the tools out a long time ago. We would have the car up on jacks. The children would be searching with flashlights. The tooth-brushing neighbor would be out with a high-end metal detector and other neighborhood men would have stood around offering support and suggestions. Somebody would have offered to make a chart and grid system for car search effectiveness and another guy would have brought beer. If I suggested in the middle of this testosterone-driven little party that maybe, just maybe, we should stop looking for his beloved possession because the car had to be returned, thus ensuring that Joe would never, ever be able to recover his thingie, he would have gone absolutely berserk about my lack of support and understanding. This, however, is not what Joe believes. Joe believes—I can tell by the way the tops of his ears were getting really, really red—that he would walk away, calmly saying things like “never mind” or “what’s done is done” or that incredibly annoying “easy come, easy go,” and then return the rental with an air of serenity, coolly kissing off whatever it was that the car had sucked into the seventh dimension.