All Wound Up

by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

  When I was a little girl, getting up in the night was understandably frowned upon, and even thwarted. My brother James was a serious nighthawk, and in being such, I think he had spoiled it for the rest of us. My mum still tells the story of him as a toddler, getting up in the night and wandering from his crib. Something woke her (likely instinct) and she discovered him standing on the stovetop in his plastic-footed jammies, trying to turn on the burners under cover of darkness. After that, the hallway had a strategically connived wall of empty apple juice cans set up as part barrier, part alarm, and any attempt to get by it toppled the cans and brought the fuzz down on you, even if you were just going to look out the front window to see how good your night vision was.

  My fondest memory as a teen wasn’t of a stolen kiss or a broken curfew (though technically, I got both) but of a walk in the night. I stole out my bedroom window and away with the boy next door. With my wool as my witness we got up to no big mischief but simply walked through the park in the night, through magic fog and mystic darkness. It is still the most romantic thing that has ever happened to me. I crept back in through my window that night, late and kissed, and with all my feelings about the luxury of the dark confirmed.

  There is much to love in the night. I like that you can’t see much, that things are secret and wild, unrevealed and insubstantial. Perhaps because my heart is that of a writer, I love that you can’t see all of it. In the night, there are mysteries and uncertainties, and those empty spots where you aren’t quite sure what’s there are more than magical to me. The empty spots let me fill in the darkness myself. The night is like a coloring book; the lines are there, but the rest is up to me. You can wander or sit in the dark, writing stories about whatever may be in the gray spaces. There is more possibility in the dark.

  As a grown-up, I still steal the nighttime moments where I can get them. I’ve always been near criminal when it comes to staying up too late. I love the hours after the family is asleep. My husband is in our bed, the girls are slumbering in theirs, so there are people here, but not really, and I am alone, but not really… and suddenly the world of possibility opens up in front of me. If I wake up in the night, I still get up and come downstairs, look out the window to test my night vision (it’s not that great anymore), and let my mind wander and think. Sometimes I make tea, and sometimes I sit in the night and I knit.

  Don’t tell.

  THE TIME OF THE BIG NOT KNITTING

  haven’t always been a knitter, but I learned when I was four, so I don’t really remember what it was like before I knit. Every now and then I’m on a bus or in a room with a bunch of other knitters, and I’ll hear one say, “you know, I just don’t know what I did before knitting,” and they look genuinely perplexed. People who used to sit on the bus without knitting all the time now look at other humans doing just that, and their minds boggle at the possibility. How are those people doing that? Did I ever do that? How many hats could I have made in all those bus rides? While I don’t know what I did before knitting, I understand the thoughts because I have a pretty good idea what I would do without knitting and, essentially, it can be summed up in two words. Poor behavior.

  I would be unreasonable. I’ve often said that people only think I’m nice, or patient, or kind, and that really I’m no such things. My real personality is intolerant, impatient, judgmental, and possibly dangerous. It’s like knitting surrounds me with some kind of science fiction bubble of kindness or patience that’s activated by yarn. The minute that humanity or circumstance starts to bring out the worst in me, I flip the switch on my force field and zap! Personality reinforcements are generated around me. Forced to sit in a room with someone I find tiresome, annoying, or irritating, I have a choice. I can haul off and tell them that I think they’ve got the brain capacity of the hairball my cat hacked up and that their ideas have about the same content, or I can knit a row and calmly state, “I’m not sure I understand your premise.” If one of my teens is screeching about how I can’t possibly understand anything about her life and I’m ruining everything because raves are totally safe (it’s just that I’m old and stupid), I can haul off and scream, “Of course I’m ruining your dangerous and demented plans. You have only sixteen years’ experience on the planet, you think that nachos are a well-balanced meal, and that the guy with the ring in his nose is twenty-one years old and still in high school because he’s ‘deep!’” Or, I can knit a row and say, “I’m sorry, sweetie. I hear how upset you are, but you still can’t go to a rave.” Knitting while I wait for a doctor appointment is something to distract me from what I really want to do, which is stomp up to the receptionist and launch into a lecture about how my time is worth just as much as the doctor’s is, and how I simply am not putting up with his policy of double booking anymore, and, as a matter of fact, I’ll be revising his appointment book personally, right this minute, so that it shows some respect to the people who are supporting his career.

  I knit when I worry, to help use up the time and space, and so that my vivid imagination doesn’t add fuel to the fire. I knit when I’m stressed, to help keep the peace, and so that I don’t make bad situations worse. In short, if I did not knit, I certainly wouldn’t be married, and I wouldn’t have friends, a job, or the ability to go out into public without slapping about twelve people a day—probably while drunk. Phrases like “a danger to herself and others” would be used, and, at the inquest, taking my knitting away from me would be cited as a major contributing factor to the “episode.”

  I have said it before, and I’ll say it again. I do not knit. I am a knitter, and knitting is not something I do, it is a personality trait, and without my knitting, I would cope less well. (That’s an understatement. When I say I would cope less well, I mean that I think about chewing on the legs of tables. Metal ones.) This, the fact that I use knitting for comfort, patience, help, and sanity, is understood really well by my family and friends—so well that when my children were toddlers they would bring me my knitting if I looked upset. So well that my girls, now that they are big, will, instead of saying, “I have bad news,” will often precede a crappy report card or something else I won’t like with the statement, “Mum, I think you might want to knit for this one.” So well, that as I stood in my wedding dress, looking nervous, my friend Denny took my bouquet and replaced it with her knitting and asked if I wanted to “do a few lines to take the edge off.” I am knitting. Knitting is me.

  Knowing this about myself, it is difficult for me to imagine not knitting, especially by choice, so I was as shocked as anyone when that is exactly what happened. At the bleakest time of last year—if you live in a northern place you’ll know this time, after all the leaves have fallen and been raked up but before the snow flies, when everything is gray and bare—my heart got broken.

  It doesn’t matter what happened. Hearts get broken all the time. Marriages crumble, people die, there are bad accidents, reversals of fortune, intentional hurts, crushing disappointments, or surprises that one can’t bear. Every person is different, and to describe to you what broke my heart would only draw a divide between us. As humans we can’t help it, can we? You hear about something that’s a heartbreak to another human, and because you are strong where they are weak, you can’t understand how it would hurt them. You can often see it in the face of someone as you try to explain your heartbreak. As you tell someone about something that has knocked you down, kicked you in the stomach, kept you awake and sobbing for ten nights, and then took your lunch money, you see that as sympathetic as they are to you, as much as they love you, they’re sort of thinking, “That’s it? That’s what all this is about?” We’re all different, and all you need to know is that something broke my heart, and I was beyond sad—and most of my family went with me. The truth is that after years and years of being a remarkably blessed family, the forces that may be decided that it was our turn, and we got our share of hurt, disease, difficulty, and pain all in one go.

  I cried. I cried in public, and really, I find cryi
ng in public so humiliating that I would rather be topless in a bar. (Okay, that’s not true. Me and my forty-two-year-old breasts would be humiliated by that as well. I’m just trying to make a point.) I can’t tell you of the hurt, and the sadness, and the way that I wondered if everyone I knew could ever be happy again, and the way that I envied people on the street who seemed happy to me. I barely ate. I scarcely spoke. I was comforted by my husband, friends, and family, but they were brokenhearted too, and it was a crappy system. I walked. I ran. I actually ran miles and miles, trying to outrun the hurt of it all. I ordered innumerable books on the topic of our hurt, but I didn’t read many of them. Joe and I went to the grocery store and couldn’t remember why we were there and ended up buying weird things we didn’t need because we knew we were there for something, and, damn it, how can a box of baking soda not help?

  There were days and days in a row when I coped by reaching for my compassion so far that the stretch burned, and days when I coped by finding the kindness in others. Some days I coped by ignoring everyone, screening calls, or sleeping. Some days I called friends or took long baths. What I didn’t do was knit. Here I was, in one of the most trying circumstances of my life, and the thing that had always kept me sane didn’t appeal at all. It was confusing and worrying. What did it mean that I didn’t want to knit? Was I unraveling as a person? Was I still me?

  I tried tempting myself with beautiful knits, the same way that one tempts the appetite of a person who’s been ill. All their favorite foods, all their favorite drinks, all to entice them back on the road to health. I got out my favorite yarns. Beautiful, gorgeous things I’d been saving. When that didn’t make me care about knitting, I went back to basics. Socks, hats, mittens—simple, good things—thinking that maybe if I started slow it would take hold again. I wasn’t the only one working on it either. My family and friends kept giving me yarn, handing me knitting, waiting for it to work like it always had. I kept taking it from them too, holding the knitting, trying to make it work so I would feel better. It didn’t work, though, and just as people feel ill at ease when a sick person won’t eat, that’s how upset we all were about the not knitting.

  It’s been a long time since then, and what I didn’t know then, but I can speculate on now, is why I didn’t want to knit. For starters, I am knitting. For lack of a better phrase, knitting is knit together into who I am, and coming back to knitting meant coming back to myself, and myself was such a crazy place to be right then that I didn’t want to go there. I was sort of worried about being me. There was fear, and heartbreak, and indecision and a nightmare in which my normally effectual self was reduced to staggering around wondering with every breath if I was okay, or doing the right thing, making the right decisions, or even managing okay. Knitting would have been being myself, and I think it was only smart that I didn’t want to be anywhere near that person and her responsibilities right then.

  It also turned out, when I did try to knit, that it felt stupid. There was no way that you could take a situation in which everything was absolutely crazy and then sit there knitting. While usually knitting helped me feel better, this time it felt like fiddling while Rome burned. For the first time, I looked at knitting and felt like there was no real way that it could help. How, really, could I look at a problem as big as my problems were then and think that yarn would solve it? Was I out of my mind? Did I think that heartbreak could really be solved by merino? How would a simple skein of yarn solve it all? Would it help if I knit anyway?

  The answer, of course, was no. In the face of a certain sort of tragedy, the lady sitting in the corner churning out a pair of socks looks crazy, and I could feel that it was crazy. Besides being solitary and meditative when what the time demanded was team effort and focus, it was also that knitting was, even when things are terrible, a comfort. It’s a distraction, a way of not dwelling in the moment, or a way of stepping back a little so you can think. For me, knitting is a huge coping mechanism, and it turns out there are times in our lives when it isn’t right to be comforted or distracted. I’m not saying pain is good; I’m saying that I found that right then, when so many people were hurt, the best thing I could do was feel all the hurt and recognize that this was where I was, and that we would all live through it.

  I’ve had people ask me, in my life, how I can listen and talk and knit, and I’ve always said that it is easy. Knitting doesn’t take much of my attention at all. Despite the fact that it looks like a lot of my energy is somewhere else, that’s not true, it’s only the tiniest little bit of myself that’s knitting—and besides (I’ve always told them) knitting has an effect on me. During this time, I realized that is very true. Knitting does have an effect on me, does help me disengage enough to cope, and does take up only a little, tiny bit of my energy. Most of the time I think that knitting helps me to pay attention. It reduces my urge to get up and wander, it gives me something to do with my hands, and far from being an indicator that I’m bored, knitting is often the way I’m keeping from being bored. Knitting takes the edge off what is difficult, challenging, or hurtful. Knitting forms that bubble around me, and in the circumstances that I suddenly found myself in, circumstances so awful, I realized that for me that bubble, that tiny bit of me that was given to knitting while I coped, wasn’t working. It was almost disrespectful to knit. To pull myself out of that pain, to cushion it in any way with yarn and distraction, was a disservice to the very real hurt feelings of those around me. They deserved, and I deserved, to have me listening and talking with all the energy I could muster, and to be as engaged as I possibly could be. The significance of what was happening to us deserved exactly that amount of hurt, and to try and avoid any of it felt dishonorable, as though I were seeking to diminish it.

  Gradually, a whole lot of the maxims that people said to us during the troubles (maxims that were infuriating when we heard them) turned out to be true. Time did heal a lot of wounds, we were strengthened by the difficulties, and we weren’t given more than we could bear. Gradually, I came back to myself, back to a place where a little soothing was a good thing, and slowly then, I knit. I admit that at first I mostly just held my knitting, but as the burdens eased, my hands started to move. I started to knit, I stopped crying… and it was actually an inverse relationship. Knitting didn’t seem to stop my tears, but the less I cried the more I was able to knit.

  Washington Irving said, “There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power.… They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, and of unspeakable love.” I will never know for sure what caused the time of the big not knitting. I won’t know if it was the broken heart (mine, or someone else’s) or if it was needing to do the work of grief without distraction, or even if I was just unwilling to leave that place and move on until it was finished somehow. I do know that there was a sacredness in my tears. They were necessary and unavoidable, and until I had cried the magic number of them, knitting was only going to get in the way. Once I had that sad work done, one by one my tears dried up, and one by one they were replaced by stitches on my needle, and I knit.

  SNACKS

  ere is the way you get yarn out of my stash: You tie one end of a rope to a doorknob, and the other end around your waist, tell a friend where you’re going so they don’t worry, and leave a note for your family telling them that you love them. Then you dive in and hope for the best, since you can’t know how long you’re going to be in there. I like to delude myself into believing that the stash has order, or some sort of organizing principle, but mostly I think I’m just telling myself that so that I don’t have to try to figure out how to come up with an order or an organizing principle. It can be a little hairy in there, both literally and metaphorically. I do try to have it make some sense. If I have a whole bunch of a particular yarn, I bag it together for sweaters, and all those sweater bags are (mostly) in the same spot. The spinning stash is (mostly) not mixed in with yarn stash, and once last year when I was overwhelmed by a problem I couldn’t sort out that was
unrelated to knitting, I went on a rampage in there and put all the silk in one area. A similar urge a time before that put all the laceweight at least near each other, but I’ve since contaminated that by firing some stray yarn into there in an emergency that concerned itself more with getting things put away than putting things away in a sensible fashion. (Likely someone was coming over. I probably stuffed all that yarn in those bags moments after shoving the dirty dishes into the oven and after stuffing the dirty laundry in a closet while planning to wipe out the bathroom sink with a pair of tights from the floor. I may not be tidy, but I am bold.)

  No matter what happens when I dive into the stash that way, there’s one thing that I have to face up to. I have rather a lot of yarn in there that has no plan nor destiny, and occurs in really strange amounts. I speak here of the single skein phenomenon. I have a ton of single balls, skeins, and hanks that I really can’t explain. There are skeins in my stash that are there because I simply thought they were pretty, or because they are souvenirs of places I’ve been, or knitters I met. (I refuse to be judged because of that. I used to think it was strange, until I met someone who buys a shot glass everywhere they go and lines them up on shelves in the family room. If they can do that, then I can do this.) There are other skeins that are samples, or stuff I was going to test to see if it felted nicely. There is even some yarn that I bought because I had a plan that made sense before I remembered that I’m not a supermodel, or yarn I own because I wish I looked better in blue than I do, and I keep buying it because hope springs eternal.

  All of that yarn, though, has a purpose, as misguided as it may be, and I love it all. The single-skein phenomenon doesn’t include any of that yarn. These are freestanding skeins that I have bought for… really no reason at all. I don’t think they’re going to be hats; there isn’t enough yardage for socks; they aren’t something I’m even planning to use as inspiration or a woolly desk ornament. They are there for no reason. None. I apparently bought them while I was in a trance state in a yarn shop—just picked each one up with no purpose at all, gave the shop my money, and walked out clutching another purposeless skein of yarn to add to the gajillions already at home. It’s behavior that’s entirely erratic and unmethodical, and while I admit to having a thousand weaknesses involving yarn, I like to believe that there is at least fleeting consideration given to my purchases. I might have a lot of yarn, but at the very least I want to be able to say it’s there for a reason. The presence of these desultory skeins says that maybe that’s not true. These yarns are there for no purpose, and I admit that I didn’t even have one when I bought them. I worry sometimes when I think about this, that my relationship with yarn isn’t healthy—or that it has hypnotic qualities or fumes that overcome me.