All Wound Up

by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

  I was thinking about this a lot when I visited a friend who was on a diet. We were having coffee when her timer went off, and she got up, counted out twenty almonds, offered me the same, and then plunked back down. “Hungry?” I asked, confused about the timer.

  “Not yet.” she said. “It’s a preemptive strike. If I have something now, before I’m hungry, then the theory is that I won’t hoover down twenty-three cookies an hour from now.”

  “Good thinking,” I agreed, and I accepted the almonds. Somewhere in the back of my mind, a light lit.

  Preemptive eating seems like a fine strategy. It’s a good way to avoid one of those episodes where you’re starving, take temporary leave of your senses, and only recover in time to have a postmortem chat and debriefing about the appropriate role of chocolate in one’s diet, or how wrong it is to eat whole cakes in single sittings. If you’re never starving, then you won’t ever eat like you are, at least theoretically. If you were trying to keep from eating a whole cake, I can see how a couple of strategically timed carrot sticks might take the edge off. All at once, I realized what’s happening in the stash.

  My self-control around food is rather good, but we all have our weaknesses, and my self-control around yarn is notoriously bad. Legendary, in fact. I’ve gone to a yarn shop with the absolute intention to buy nothing, and walked out twenty minutes later with a whole sweater’s worth and the deflated feeling of having lost a little self-respect. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with buying yarn. I like buying yarn, but it should at least be intentional, and that’s not what happens when you go in there and make snap decisions. It’s impulsive and a little weak, and it’s totally like deciding you’re not going to eat any junk at a party and then lying in bed four hours later wondering what the hell you were doing when you stationed yourself by the chips and refused to give up the territory like it was a key holding in a world war. At first that’s what bothered me about the single skeins in the stash. I thought that they were the result of those spasms in the yarn shops. I thought that I have all those hanging around because they’re the symptoms of a yarn disease. I was looking at that stack of single skeins and feeling like they were the products of a yarn binge. I was wrong.

  They are snacks. They aren’t the disease; they’re what I’m using as a treatment and prevention. It’s like taking methadone instead of straight up using heroin—to draw a rather crass analogy. I can see what happened now. I was in the yarn shop, I started to get weak and feel a whole sweater’s worth of yarn coming on, and I reached out for a carrot stick, the first little skein that I could find, and I bought it, and held it, and took it home. Those snack skeins are part of an instinctive protection plan. Without them, things could have been a lot worse, and that changed my attitude about them a little, made them more of a point of pride. They aren’t random; they aren’t there for no reason; and they might not have any intention of becoming mittens, but they’re still serving a tidy little purpose. I’m okay with that, mostly. The only thing wrong with the system is that, just like other kinds of snacks, skeins can really add up.

  THE COOL TABLE

  hen I was a teenager, I had a lot of problems. Not anything that was unusual or should put me in a category for special pity, you understand, just an ordinary list of problems that almost every teenager could come up with. I was dorky; I had trouble in a couple of subjects; I was short; I couldn’t dance; I was lame at sports. I liked to read; I made some of my own clothes; my family had no money. While every other kid had a different but comparable list, my own personal list of adolescent problems was so intensely crippling that I really didn’t see how they could ever stop defining my life.

  Don’t get me wrong—I had a lot going for me too. I was funny, I could be charming, and while I wasn’t very pretty and had horribly big glasses, my figure was good, and I possessed a pretty big rack, which I’m ashamed to note, can make up for a lot if your primary audience is teenaged boys (who are more interested in breasts than glasses) and teenaged girls, who, while they resent that boys are more interested in breasts than glasses, know that it’s a really unfortunate truth. I struggled through the way that most kids do, and the way I watch my kids struggle now. Things like skipping French because a boy you liked was skipping French and if you skipped French you could perhaps get a little face time with him, and knowing that’s wrong and is going to mess you up later, but doing it anyway because you feel like the only thing that matters is now, even though you know that can’t be true. How about worrying that the fact that you went to science with your fly undone and a piece of spinach in your teeth really was going to define your whole life, and feeling helpless to stop the humiliation anyway?

  Every once in a while there was someone who didn’t have problems in high school. Someone upon whom, for reasons that belong to the universe alone, some magical fairy dust had settled so that the Red Sea that was adolescence parted in front of them. They were the right size, the right shape, had the right grades, had the right sort of charm, dated the right people… burned small chickens by the willow tree at midnight on full moons.… I have no idea, but whatever mystic thing it is that you need to do to get through high school feeling like things are okay, these people had it. When I cast my mind back on those people who had it together back then, they’re a pretty diverse group, and the unifying theme of them, the thing that they all had in common, wasn’t how they looked or what they wore, or what clubs they belonged to, it was that they were comfortable—really, genuinely comfortable—being a teen and navigating high school.

  Keep in mind that I’m not talking about the kids who looked like they were beautiful and in charge and had tons of friends, but were really only there because of some horrible power struggle that they conquered. You know the kind. The really pretty girl coasting through the school in tiny little $300 jeans, smiling away on the arm of some young Godly Adonis everyone adored (you know the one—the one who’s fatal flaw was that he couldn’t see that his girlfriends were all jean-clad harpies and barracudas who had the likes of me for breakfast without even thinking about it). I don’t mean those girls, or those boys, because we all knew even then that they weren’t actually happy, just powerful, and they worked a complicated system to be there, and we didn’t really want to be them. We just wanted their jeans, and, actually, just wanted their jeans to fit. I’m talking instead about the kids who really were honest-to-goodness happy. The kids who had tons of friends, seemed to like everyone, and seemed to be liked by everyone. The ones who succeeded in one way or another at nearly everything that they set their hands to, and when they did fail, did so with humor and laughter that only further endeared them to all.

  These were the kids who ended up being valedictorian and president of the student council and got awards for being community leaders. And when they got the awards, you actually clapped for them, because, while you were envious and wished that whatever it was that was working for them could for you, you actually liked them, damn it, because they were likeable. I’m sure they’ve gone on to have their own problems and challenges, these civic leaders and volleyball captains and heads of the art club, but at the time, they looked like golden shining people. At lunch time, they sat in little knots of happy teenagers, and they laughed, and studied, and helped each other, and if you went up to them at their cool tables (because that’s how I thought of them, cool kids sitting at a cool table) and talked to them, they were always nice. I have never, ever wished harder to be something more than I wished to be someone who was comfortable enough with themselves to be at the cool table.

  Me, I was not that kid. I think I was born uncool. I was awkward and out of place from day one, right from that first afternoon in kindergarten when Julie let the water in the water play table out on Suzanne’s velvet shoes and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why, or how, or if it was appropriate revenge for Suzanne showing off said shoes. (Julie is still my friend and has assured me that it was indeed appropriate, and that Suzanne was overly smug about h
er shoes.) From that moment, there has been a system at work, a series of credits and debits to whatever rank it is that determines who’s cool and who’s not, and despite spending a lot of time in my youth trying to figure that system out, probably as much as you did, I still don’t understand. Lying in your bed at night wondering about the best way to say “hi” to someone the next day or whether or not you really did dare to show up in that shirt that your mum bought you that had the little ruffles on it, since that might or might not be the sort of thing that could ruin two weeks of good solid work on your image. I have never really had any idea how it works or if I’m doing okay, and it was particularly baffling in high school.

  In high school, I tried to run the system. I really did. I noted that one of the cool kids wore her jean jacket inside out, and that everyone thought that was really, super cool, and so that night at home I stood in front of the mirror, jean jacket on inside out, staring in the mirror, and I realized that it wasn’t going to work. I didn’t have the secret, and while Marie could wear her jacket inside out, and whatever magic she possessed made her look like a creative person who wasn’t afraid to let her inner self shine, me wearing mine inside out made me look like, at sixteen, I still didn’t know how to dress myself and should be signed up for some special remedial help. I could see that. I really could, and it wasn’t low self-esteem talking. It was that Marie could somehow walk into a room ten minutes late and make everyone else feel like they were early, and that’s an adolescent voodoo that gets you to the cool table, and there’s just nothing that anyone can do about that. It’s the same voodoo that means that one kid can totally connect with a volleyball and send it over the net in a graceful arc to me (the kid with her knitting on the bench—just in case) waiting on the other side, and the ball, in a sort of cosmic destiny, has absolutely no choice but to follow its preordained path from the cool kid’s hands to connect squarely (and much to the cool kid’s horror) with my face. It’s just the way it is, and nobody can fix it.

  Once I figured that out, once I tripped on the stairs in front of the boy I liked and got a public nosebleed, once I tried to sew a skirt that looked like Lynne’s and instead went to school swimming in a sea of denial and a travesty of fabric, once I showed off my plans for the school play’s sets and got the gig, only to have my name accidentally left off of the program, once I essentially got the memo that this was definitely not my time, once I understood that being the sort of kid who wants to make her own yogurt and has a sizeable yarn stash while still in high school is just not going to be cool—ever—once I got that through my head (a volleyball to the face really can be an epiphany of sorts), it was almost freeing. I allowed myself to stop trying to be them; and for better or for worse, the only thing left to be was me.

  I was just thinking, as I typed this, that if this were a novel for teenagers, one of those books with a lesson, or one of those movies that is supposed to make teenagers feel better about being a teenager, that this is the point where I would write about how I let go of trying to be someone else and embraced the real me, and in so doing, became loved by all. If Lindsay Lohan were in the story, that would be the resolution of the plot. She would have spent the whole film trying to be a cool girl—with tragic results for both her soul and her social standing—only to learn (tearfully) that, really, she should just be her herself, and then (ironically) she would be rewarded with the love of all, becoming the cool girl that she always wanted to be. (Actually, I think there is a Lindsay Lohan teenager movie like that. Actually, I think all teenager movies are like that.)

  The reality is that it just doesn’t work that way. Eventually all dorky, awkward kids realize that they can’t stop the dork from happening, and they give up, and some of them outgrow it and become the sort of cool they always wanted to be, and some of them don’t. Some of them actually become dorky, awkward adults who knit too much and have to tell people at parties that they “write knitting humor books” and endure the look that comes next. Some of those kids are never, ever going to be less dorky—never. For once, I would like to publicly state that, as someone who has endured a series of public humiliations that has continued since the day of the public nosebleed in grade nine. (In fact, I tripped over the doorjamb in the grocery store the other day only to discover my fly was down as people helped me up.) The great and glorious myth that we let Lindsay Lohan portray in movies is the absolute insanity that if you “be yourself” you’ll somehow be cool. It pisses me off, because sometimes just being yourself doesn’t pay off for a long, long time, and when you finally are yourself, whatever yourself is when you decide that’s who you are, it doesn’t necessarily pay off the way that the movies say it does.

  Sometimes, when you finally are yourself—your knitting, yogurt-making, frumpily clad, not-too-tall, wearing-handknit-lace-shawls-in-the-grocery-store self—sometimes the payoff isn’t what you think it is. Take me, just for example. I am unequivocally not less dorky than I was when I was that teenager. I still show up places and realize that I’m wearing all the wrong things, and I still find myself at parties where I am desperately out of place. Like the Christmas party I was invited to last year. I showed up wearing what I always do, which in my mind was something I thought was handmade and fantastic but was truthfully jeans and a T-shirt dressed up with a handknit shawl for a touch of class. The moment I arrived, I knew I was sunk. I’d brought a hostess gift of handknit scrubbies and pretty soap, and all the other families had a bottle of wine, and I wasn’t just the only woman wearing a shawl, I was also pretty much the only woman not wearing a Vera Wang Christmas sweater with little sequined reindeer on it. I spent the whole evening doing that calculation that you do when you realize that you’re in the wrong place and have to figure out how long you have to stay to not compound your dorkiness by being rude. When the family down the road left, so did I. Walking home through the dark, I asked myself important questions. Was my life always going to be like this? Was I ever going to be a woman comfortable with who she is? Why were Vera Wang sweaters so expensive?

  I was crushed, and I stayed crushed until the next evening, when I went to a Christmas party at my local yarn shop. I walked in, wearing my shawl and my jeans, and I wasn’t the only one. My friend thought my handknit gift was good, because she knit me something too. We told knitting jokes; we laughed together, an unlikely crew; and I stood there, surrounded by my people and I realized something. I’m sitting at the cool table. I’ve wanted to be cool my whole life, and here it had happened by accident. The things that once set me apart (like a big stash) are strengths in this place, and the things that were working for me then still are. (Except for the rack. Beauty fades.) Suddenly I’m sitting here with a lot of other people who the whole world might think are dorks, and even I can admit that I never thought the cool table would be in a yarn shop, but suddenly I feel like I imagine those happy kids did at their table in high school, and it might not be a movie plot, but it’s more than enough.

  Stephanie Pearl-McPhee lives with her very patient husband and three charming daughters in an untidy, wool-f illed house in Toronto, Canada, where she avoids doing the laundry and knits whenever she gets a minute. She is the author of Yarn Harlot and Free-Range Knitter, and maintains a popular blog at www.yarnharlot.ca.