I’m knitting a blanket for my nephew’s baby. He’s due on New Year’s Eve. I thought about making him some mittens, or a hat, but I’ve never been that interested in following patterns. They seem too much like directions for assembling Ikea furniture. I knit for instant gratification. And because it has a calming effect on me.
There is something innocuous about knitting that I find comforting. It’s also grounding, the act itself tethering my mind to my hands lest I drop a stitch. Left to its own devices, my mind has a tendency to embrace those irresistible magnets called worry and fear.
This time of year is difficult for many. There is a great deal of financial stress out there, a continuing threat of Covid, and the isolation of family members from each other. Even those who can be with loved ones during the holidays still have to navigate around a bevy of emotional land mines that lie waiting to explode with one false step.
I come from a traditional family, and spent every Christmas with my parents until I had a family of my own. And even then, until we moved away. This year will be the first in 28 years that I haven’t had one of my kids with me at Christmas. And that realization torpedoed me, sent me spinning into the deep. I was caught off guard, not expecting to feel this gutted so late in my mothering career. I thought I was done with the empty nest, thought that was the last big emotional hit. Nobody tells you these things.
It doesn’t help that I’m forced to stay inside at the moment, nursing an eye injury. I need my time outdoors, in nature, moving and breathing away general anxiety. But now, in forced stillness, my mind has caught up with my body and I feel pinned to a board like a butterfly, thoughts beating frantically around my brain like wings, flooding me in yet another loss.
“Sounds like it’s time for a knitting project,” my sister in law advised the other day, when I complained to her about my internment. And so I raced off to the yarn store in relief, as if it were a pharmacy holding a pain medication prescription for me.
I’m now on the couch holding my needles, yarn wrapped around my finger like a lifeline. Yards of it are unspooled at my feet, waiting to be transformed into something that makes sense to me, into a gift at Christmastime. Sugar is curled at my side, purring. As the rows begin to accumulate, I can feel my heart rate slow, and I think about what joy a new baby coming into the world will bring.
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