If there had been an incident report filed for that day, and frankly I’m still shocked that there wasn’t, going to lie down and leaving convicted (if shamed) felons in the kitchen alone would be referred to as “a strategic error of epic proportions.” Myself, I’ve moved through the pain and forgiven myself, and now think of it as a rookie mistake, made because of the burden of parenthood and the fact that I hadn’t properly slept through the night in a decade. As I lay there, eyes closed, plotting some sort of teachable moment to install compassion and law-abiding behavior in my daughters, I did not hear them. I did not hear anything at all, and instead of letting that register as a warning, I simply thanked my lucky stars that I’d gotten another thing right. Yes, that’s what I did. I lay there, congratulating myself on silence and absolute peace gained through superior and thoughtful parenting. I lay there, in fact, while my daughters realized several things—or so they told me during the debriefing much later, when I could stand to look at them again.
Here is what they realized.
1. There were balloons left over, still in the kitchen drawer.
2. They were in the kitchen with the balloons.
3. There was a tap in the kitchen.
4. Despite everything that I had told them, if I really, really didn’t want them to throw water balloons in the house, I would have taken away the balloons. (Point to the nine-year-old on that one. The force is strong within her.)
I will spare you the details of the inevitable scene that followed, and only tell you this. When I started to run after the first splash, I was without thought. I was so angry that I could no longer think. I entered the kitchen at a dead run, confirming with shuddering disbelief that my little daughters, apparently no longer human but transformed to vile demon-spawn, were indeed in a second water-balloon fight happening within the walls of my home. I opened my mouth to say any number of things—none of them kind, civil, or responsible—and as I took a deep breath to unleash the fury I could no longer contain, I really had no idea what sort of things I might do to my children in that moment. Right then, a sky-blue balloon sailed through the air… and hit me square in the chest. It exploded on impact with my body, drenched me head to toe, and covered me not just with freezing tap water but also with an almost preternatural sense of calm.
I suddenly knew what I had to do. I did not ask them to clean up and take responsibility. I did not explain what they had done wrong, or attempt to salvage their precious developing senses of self. As I stood there, with a shred of blue latex shrapnel clinging to the edge of my nose, I could feel that I was way past being concerned with imparting life lessons. I realized that I had to do the right thing. I had to save their lives. I picked the evidence off my face. I wiped my dripping forehead, and I said one word.
Bed.
They stared at me for an instant, and then I saw it come over them. They realized that what they did next was going to determine their survival, and their instincts kicked in, and without a single word of complaint or explanation, all three of them filed upstairs smartly at two o’clock in the afternoon, changed into pajamas, and lay motionless in their beds. Not a single child moved, and they remained soundlessly there until an unbelievable seven o’clock the next morning.
If you ask my children now about that day, they all remember it clearly. They remember thinking that at some point I would cool off and come up and get them, talk it through, and forgive them. They remember listening to me come up the stairs at five-thirty, thinking that this was the moment of exoneration, and then being astonished when I wordlessly set plates of supper by their bedsides. Megan remembers the sun shining in her face while she lay there. Amanda remembers feeling guilty. Sam only remembers that the whole water balloon fight thing wasn’t her idea, and maintains that she was a baby, drawn into evil by her older, wretched sisters. Not one of them can tell me why they didn’t get up. Why not a single one of them challenged the ban, made a break for it, tried to negotiate, or even called out to me to apologize in the seventeen hours that they lay in their beds. I don’t know why they didn’t either. Think about that. They were nine, seven, and four, and they lay there soundlessly without a single word. I remember that whole afternoon thinking that I should go and make peace with them, and wondering why they didn’t call out to me. (Admittedly, every time I thought about going, I was dripped on by more evidence, and that helped me maintain a clarity of vision and resolve.) Mostly what I remember is that the next day on the playground, when all was forgiven and my incredibly well rested children were playing and explaining to the other families why they had missed an evening at the park, that face after face, parents and children alike would turn toward me and stare. I think it was respect, I know it was likely also fear, but I tell you this: They never heard of anything like it again, and I am legend.
AN IRRESPONSIBLE MULTIPLIER
hen I was in the seventh grade, I had a real barker of a math teacher. My mother maintains that he wasn’t as bad as I recall him, but she wasn’t there, day in, day out, and I still remember that sort of madness where a whole class of seventh graders knew without a shadow of a doubt that the man was both sadistic and out of his mind, and there was somehow not a single adult who could see it. (I admit, now that I’m a mother I wonder how often my kids and their friends sit around boggling at my brand of madness, but I try not to think about it.) The point is, this guy was not cut out to be a teacher. He was just too loud, too jumpy, and too high strung. His name was not Mr. Franco, though that’s what I’ll call him here, to protect his privacy on the off chance that there has been an injustice and he has not yet been struck by lightning. Mr. Franco was a crappy teacher, and I was a crappy math student. I struggled with the concepts at the best of times, but he got frustrated when I couldn’t learn, and once he got upset and started yelling, then I got upset and once I was upset I got stupider by the minute. Realizing I was upset further discombobulated me to the point of idiocy and then I couldn’t even add, and then Mr. Franco would become crazed and start doing things like slamming rulers against tables, and then one girl always cried. It didn’t matter who Mr. Franco was yelling at, or what he was yelling about, this tall girl with the desk behind mine would just suddenly take to a sort of desperate weeping. It was horrible. My mother believes that my difficulty and general lack of good feeling about mathematics began that year, but I know that it’s just her maternal love for me that won’t let her believe that I’ve always been terrible at it, even before Mr. Franco gave me the pseudo–post-traumatic stress disorder that crops up and makes the little muscle over my right eye twitch every time I hear the word “multiply” even in a biblical context.
Mr. Franco, in addition to being mean and smelling funny, was also the first teacher to tell me a lie. I was old enough that by then I’d been told lots of lies by other people, and I knew it. That the tooth fairy gave the kid down the street more money than she gave me because Bobby had bigger teeth, that other children loved doing chores and never tried to dodge them, or that it was absolutely normal to have a great aunt who drank milk with rye (equal parts) for breakfast. This, though, this was the first bald-faced lie told to me in a school by someone who was supposed to be in the business of revealing the truth about how things worked. The lie was this: Mr. Franco told me that there was only one right answer to a question. 7 x 7 was always going to be 49 (I think that was the number he said) and he maintained that if you got any other answer, then you were wrong. Absolutely wrong, and he then said (here comes the lie) that mathematics was beautiful because that was always true. One right answer, no exceptions.
Now, I’m not really a “no exceptions” sort of person, which is probably why I was suspicious from the minute he said it (mostly because I was working hard at multiplication and got bizarre answers all the time) but the older I get, the more I come to completely understand that he was wrong. The world is simply not that black and white, even when it comes to math.
Knitters engage in math all the time. If you’re going to start
designing stuff or altering patterns or thrusting your own ideas from yarn to reality, then you’re likely going to get in pretty thick with it, but even habitual number avoiders like me will find that even with diligent effort, it’s just about impossible to knit and not do any math at all. When a pattern tells you to increase fourteen times evenly across seventy stitches, there’s almost no way out of it without doing simple division (70 ÷14 = one increase every five stitches). Similarly, if you want to make a scarf and use a particular stitch pattern, one with a repeat of fifteen stitches, you’re going to have to be able to add fifteen together enough times to get the width you’d like to have. (Don’t forget the addition you’ll need to do to add stitches for the edges, and then the subtraction when the thing is inevitably wider than your neck.) Even if you’re not doing math computations, mathematic concepts start cropping up where you least expect them, and I’m not even talking about simple math. Knitting math is higher math. Math of a philosophical nature. Math they talk about in lecture halls in universities with ivy on them. Math I will try to explain now, although remember, Mr. Franco’s seventh grade class took a terrible and permanent toll on me. If you’re a math teacher reading this, cut me some slack.
Let’s start with gauge. Gauge is the problem child of knitting mathematics. In its simplest form gauge should work, which is to say that if a knitter reads that she needs six stitches to the inch, knits swatches with assorted needle sizes until she bloody well gets six stitches to the inch, and then uses that needle size and that yarn to make a sweater, then that sweater should (possessing the required gauge) be exactly, precisely the size that the pattern predicts. This is, in mathematics, called a deterministic system. That’s a system where if you do the same thing with the same stuff under the same circumstances, you always get the same result, because there’s no randomness in it. Multiplication works that way. If you take seven groups of seven and put them together, then you are always, always, cross my heart and hope to die, sell my best merino, going to get the same answer. (That dare on the stash might be going too far. I’ve already said my math isn’t good enough to risk it on my skills. There will be some knitter with a PhD in multiplication who takes it from me on some technicality.) Gauge should, since it’s only a version of multiplication, work exactly the same way, but here’s where it falls apart.
Any knitter, even without the help of a single day in a mathematics classroom, can tell you that gauge lies. Lies like a rug. Lies like a four-year-old just caught alone in the bathroom with the family cat. (Hint: Look for the scissors.) We have all had the experience of carefully and precisely getting six stitches to the inch, just like the pattern said, then casting on exactly as many stitches as the pattern said to and then promptly getting a sweater that is either so surprisingly small that you wouldn’t put it on a streetwalker and think her appropriately covered, or so large that right after you put it out on the line to dry a family pulled up in a minivan, stuck a tent pole under the right shoulder, tossed four sleeping bags under the belly of it, and started a campfire. What happened? You added six to six as many times as you were told, and the answer should always be the same, right?
I should be very fond of math. I like control, I like predictability, I like knowing what is going to happen and when, and most math is like that. In mathematics, 2 + 2 is always going to be 4. The Pythagorean theorem never changes; it is always a2 + b2 = c2, no matter how many times you do it. It doesn’t even matter if you don’t know what it means; it’s still the same. Most math rules are so hard and fast that if you get another answer, then you know that you’ve made a mistake. It took me four years of grade ten math (I had some trouble with success on that one) to learn that math at all levels is about trying to figure out what the general rules are. I find this idea really comforting. As difficult as I find computational math to be, at least there aren’t an infinite number of answers. If you are a mathematician, there are some things in the world that you just know are true. They are unchangeable, unshakable truths—unlike a philosopher’s theories, or an artist’s imagination, or a minister’s faith, mathematicians get to deal in what they can prove.
Despite being sold to us as a purely deterministic system, gauge, it turns out, isn’t. If a philosopher finds something that doesn’t work the way it should, they wonder if it is another idea, a theory. They acknowledge that there is much in this world that they do not know yet, and they begin the process of examining the mystery to unravel what might lie behind it. They can resign their misunderstanding and trust in their faith that it makes sense somewhere else. If an artist sees something that doesn’t work the way they expect it to, it opens up a world of possibility, where any answer can work if you can draw, sculpt, or paint it. If a minister encounters something that they aren’t expecting, like a busload of nuns going over a cliff, they can say it is an act of God, something that has a purpose that is only understood by a higher, more complex power. In math, it turns out that if a mathematician encounters a deterministic system that isn’t being deterministic they know that they are now dealing in chaos math.
Chaos math, my friends, is when a system is extremely sensitive to the conditions around it, and that sensitivity has an influence that is so profound that it becomes pretty much impossible to predict what might happen anymore. The Butterfly Effect is like this. Ray Bradbury wrote a short story (“A Sound of Thunder”) in 1952 in which a group of time travelers accidentally killed a prehistoric butterfly, and that one tiny change was enough to ripple through time and mean that they returned to a very, very different place from the one they left. One little change in the initial conditions, one tiny thing that you can’t see, hear, or imagine influencing the rest of the system, and even though technically that system is deterministic, now there’s no way to know how it will all end. It’s no longer predictable. It has become chaos. (For the record, to my way of thinking, it seems that once a system is chaotic, it can’t be deterministic anymore, but mathematicians now call this deterministic chaos, which only goes to show you how much I have yet to learn, and how likely I am to get a lot of letters from mathematicians about this essay.)
Knowing what we know now, gauge starts to make sense, doesn’t it? In a deterministic system, the answer is only predictable if you can repeat the identical system. A billiard ball will only land in the same pocket of the table if it is hit in the same way, precisely, every time. If there’s a wind, if a drunk bumps the table, if the ball has dirt on it… voilà! Chaos. The system is still predictable, sort of, but only if you know about the dirt, the wind, or the drunk, and can precisely predict their behavior too. This, my darling and clever knitters, is exactly what’s happening with gauge. Sure, ten stitches make an inch. That should mean, if the system was purely deterministic, that thirty stitches would be three inches, and one hundred stitches ten. You and I, though, we know that whether or not that actually happens is a total crap shoot, and now we can be comforted by knowing that gauge is actually deterministic chaos. You are human. You cannot possibly do things precisely the same way every time. Occasionally, some stitches are going to be imperceptibly looser than the others, because you relaxed a little, or had a glass of wine. A few others are going to be tighter, because you were on the bus or your spouse tried to tell you again that they are absolutely cleaning the cat box every day, when you know that absolutely isn’t true and are considering getting nanny-cam footage to prove it.
How about the fact that the tens of thousands of stitches in a sweater are heavier than the few in the swatch? What impact does that have on a sweater as a whole? I measure all my swatches on the table, horizontally, but when I wear them I’m almost always vertical. Will there be stretch? How much? Are there seams? The swatch didn’t have seams, and that could change everything. Did you wash the swatch? You’re going to wash the sweater, and the yarn might relax, tighten up, bloom, explode—anything could happen.
All of this, all of these little, tiny things seem so trivial when you’re holding a swatch. They seem like they
won’t matter at all, but something like mis-measuring your gauge by one eighth of a stitch, for knitters… That right there is the flap of the butterfly’s wings. That tiny moment, where you missed a fraction of a stitch, that inconsequential thing that, really, you couldn’t even have known you were doing, that right there is magnified, rippling ever outward until all you’re left with is a broken shadow of a knitter weeping softly in a corner holding a couple hundred dollars’ worth of cashmere that’s supposed to be a snappy little twin set, yet is something closer to elephant lingerie.
You know what this means to knitting? To have insidious influences creeping into your deterministic system? It means you don’t have a deterministic system anymore. You have deterministic chaos, and the important word there is chaos. The only reasonable thing to do with a chaotic system is to realize that it’s no longer predictive. You can’t know the outcome. Not completely. Doing a gauge swatch will give you valuable information (probably), but it also might lie like a rug, and now you can stop feeling angry or incompetent when that happens. This math thing takes you entirely off the hook. You can’t predict all of the factors that will come into play—it’s just not possible. It’s like expecting to know what a two-year-old might put up her nose or what a teenager sees in that pierced guy. You’ll never know, and trying to know will just make you insane. It is better, much better, to acknowledge that now you understand what’s going on with gauge. It isn’t a purely deterministic system, and any knitting teacher who tells you otherwise is just shining you on, or she’s encountered one of the possibilities in a chaotic system, which for her, just once, when everything was exactly in her favor and she didn’t know it, worked, and that one time has convinced her it’s possible for it to happen again. What we do know is that there is no chance that people like her haven’t been burned by this. They’re either in denial because of the pain, or they’re keeping it a secret to appear superior. You know the truth. You know in your heart that gauge is simply an irresponsible multiplier. There are forces at work when you knit that are mysterious, deep, and mathematical.
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