Free-Range Knitter Read online

  Maybe it was that golf was social? I countered with examples of knit culture and pointed out that I and millions of other knitters went knitting with our friends to Stitch and Bitches and Knit Nights, not to mention knitting retreats and conventions and classes. I threw in the sheep and wool festivals for good measure. Perhaps golfers spent more money? He stopped himself on that one. Golfers did have green fees and costs to play, but at least they didn’t need to buy a new set of clubs every time they golfed because the last set turned into a sweater when they were done playing. He went on and on, offering a multitude of suggestions. “It’s a sport,” he said, “you have to learn a set of skills to play it,” and I told him to give it up. To just quit it. It was, it seemed to me, just like the fishing weekend compared to the knitting weekend. Golfing and recreational fishing, the kind where you even throw back the fish, didn’t even make anything, I pointed out. They weren’t even productive. I could acknowledge that both fishing and golf might be fun, that they were the pursuit of human skill and talent, and that I didn’t think they were worthless; I just didn’t think they were more worthwhile than knitting.

  “It’s about respect,” I told Joe, and I meant it. Nobody tells golfers they’re wasting time. Nobody tells fishermen you can buy fish at the store and asks why anyone would bother to do it. At the end of the day, all debates exhausted, the only difference that I could divine seemed to be that golf was done mostly by men and knitting mostly by women, and that made one valid and the other vacuous.

  I sighed deeply and looked at my husband, still doing his best to catch up.

  “So what you’re saying,” he said, slowly and patiently, beginning to appear enlightened, “is that you want a radio show?”

  “For starters,” I said, and I picked up my knitting.

  What It Looks Like

  I was knitting a pair of pale pink baby booties on the bus when an older gentleman sat down beside me, looked carefully at me and then at what I was knitting, and then smiled warmly and congratulated me on the forthcoming blessed event. I was a little startled, and I think I may have audibly gasped, as for a single heartbeat I was afraid I’d been so busy that I was in advanced state of pregnancy and hadn’t noticed yet. When I caught my breath, I thanked him for his kindness and let it go. I suppose I could have corrected him, but I thought he might be embarrassed, it would have taken up happy knitting time, and I’m finally old enough to let other people’s mistakes go sometimes. It actually doesn’t matter whether a guy on the bus thinks I’m knocked up as long as I know I’m not. As it was, I returned his smile, turned to thinking and knitting, and thought about him.

  I feel that I know why he said that, and I know the gentleman is not unkind. He is at worst ignorant and probably merely a victim of a well-worn cliché. It certainly hasn’t been very long since a woman of a childbearing age knitting a pair of baby booties was a reasonable social cue. Women, especially well-behaved ones who were going to be very good mothers, all flirted with knitting baby booties. It’s how Wilma told Fred she was pregnant on the Flintstones, for crying out loud, and a moment like that has to leave a cultural echo, whether it’s a little insulting or not. It’s the way stereotypes are born, and knitting has more than its fair share of them.

  Now, I am not naive. (Or perhaps I should say I’m not very naive. I have to cop to it a little since I was stunned just a few years ago to discover that the woman down the street who keeps finding things that “fell off a truck” really is actually a criminal, not just someone who has an odd and remarkable talent for finding traffic accidents littered with abandoned merchandise.) As much as stereotypes about knitters (or anybody, really, though I am probably guilty of a few) bug the daylights out of me, I know that they must have come about for a reason. Stereotypes are usually born of a common belief, and common beliefs come about because a majority (or at least a bunch) of the people that you’re forming an idea about fit within your concept. The guy thought I was pregnant because a lot of women learn to knit when they’re pregnant, and that’s true. I know lots of women who think of knitting for the very first time when they are expecting a baby. It’s like you’re making one thing (the baby) and you think, “Wow. This making stuff sure is satisfying. Maybe I could make a whole bunch of stuff, maybe I could even make stuff for the stuff I’m making,” and you’re off to the races. Lots of pregnant women start knitting, and all of a sudden a little old guy on a bus is making a logical (and sort of weird) leap. That root of truth gave birth to a broader idea that he’s trying to apply to all women knitting.

  Now, you and I, we know that none of the stereotypes are all the way accurate, and at worst, they are offensive. Knitters are simply not all women. Knitters are truly not all old ladies, and there are lots of reasons why a woman might take up knitting other than pregnancy (though oddly, I hope the gentleman who congratulated me the other day was responding to a stereotype and the baby booties I was knitting rather than making some sort of statement about my physique). We do not all own cats, and similarly, despite all the booties, warm mittens, and fuzzy stuff we own, despite all of the grandmothers who knit before us, I assure you, we are not all nice. There are nasty knitters, just as there are nasty plumbers or writers or politicians. (Sorry. That last one wasn’t exactly a strong example, though I’m sure the opposite is true with them at least some of the time.) There are clever knitters, and funny knitters, and silly knitters (I would especially look out for the ones that are both nasty and clever; they are very slippery), and to tell you the truth, I find the very idea that all knitters are nice rather offensive. It implies somehow that the general consensus is that knitters are sort of a kindly but dim crowd, not really bright enough to be trouble.

  Knitters are a truly diverse crowd and (as any yarn company executive would be happy to explain to you after a double shot of rye) hugely unpredictable. There’s no demographic. Knitters love acrylic novelty yarns. That’s a true statement; the industry sells tons and tons of it every year. Knitters also like natural fibers, with millions of skeins purchased for stashes around the world. Knitters love to knit socks. Knitters find socks too hard. Knitters are old ladies. Knitters are young professionals. Starting to see the trouble? All those statements are entirely true, but they aren’t true of all knitters. Other industries have “a type,” someone that they know is most likely to buy their product, and they can profile that person like a serial killer and target them specifically. Thus far, all attempts to profile knitters and come up with one character sketch that rings true for most of them have been the leading cause of alcoholism in yarn industry marketing personnel. What frustrates them delights me, since I am an independent observer of the free-range knitter, and this same lack of demographic or profile is a constant joy to me. Not only is it more fun than watching my husband cook (and trust me, that’s very fun; he thinks things stop cooking when you aren’t looking at them), it’s truly surprising. Stereotypes about knitters abound, but the ones our culture holds dearest are the ones most likely to be inaccurate, and as quick as you can say “all knitters are women,” or are old, or have cats, or have buckets of free time, or are mothers or grandmothers, then in walks a twenty-two-year-old, straight, dog-owning guy who knits baby booties during football games and when things are slow at NASA.

  That said, and all facts established, I have a friend with whom I play a little game called “knitter.” We sit in a place that we expect will be visited by both knitters and ordinary people—say a hotel hosting a knitting convention or a restaurant near a busy yarn shop. We take up residence, get a drink, and take out our knitting, and we people watch. We look hard. We try to spot, among the comings and goings of busy humanity, all the knitters. If either of us thinks we see one, we exclaim (or whisper, depending on the background noise), “Knitter!” (We refrain from pointing. It’s rude and breaks the rhythm of our stitching.) We are surprised how often we say it in unison.

  I can hear you; you’re sighing and saying, “Of course you can spot them, you idiots. They are
wearing a sweater or a scarf that marks them as surely as the tail of a peacock sets it apart from a chicken,” and to be sure, that can be a tip-off. (For the purposes of the game, you do get fewer points for those who are swathed in knitwear. It’s too much of a gimme.) But even in the summer, when there is no woolly evidence to give them away, or in the winter in the case of my Canadian home, where everyone is wearing wool, we think instead that we can spot them because they are just … different.

  Just like the old man who thought he could tell something about me, I think I can tell something about them. That their knitterlyness shows up in the way they walk or move, or in their auras, or the simple look of them. Perhaps I’ve never even been right, but I like to believe that there is a silent kinship or a wave of connection, some clues that humans can use to figure each other out and find our like, some intangible hint, something that makes us look up and say, “Ah, there’s something I understand. There’s a knitter.”

  Then again, maybe my assumptions about these people are just as off as the ideas people have about me, although you’d be surprised how often the person I think is a knitter turns a little and has yarn trailing out of his or her bag.

  Knitting Self-Esteem

  Some time ago, I had an epiphany. A sudden realization of what seemed to be a great truth, which sounds impressive, but I have them all the time. The last one had to do with the nature of motherhood, which came to me as I scraped dried cottage cheese off the inside of the refrigerator, and I realized that really, I thought that maybe, in some sort of primal challenge thing, our kids were trying to get us to abandon our home so that they could have it for themselves. The one before that had me coming to understand that almost all housework is stupid since it puts you, a free-thinking sentient being, in the service of inanimate objects that don’t even care if they are clean, but I digress. This latest one came to me while I was knitting socks, which is so much a higher calling than removing adhered dairy products from an appliance that it just had to yield a better one.

  They were very fancy socks, and I was about halfway through the intricate cabling and fancy heel turning when I began to think how much doing exactly this confuses non-knitters. Not knitting in general, but this sort of fancy-pants time-consuming suck of a pair of socks. These socks, which were going to be simply exquisite, were going to be hidden in shoes for almost their entire lifetime. Nobody but me probably would ever get any sort of pleasure out of them. They weren’t like mittens, where they were right out in front, and people could see, and they weren’t like sweaters, where when you finished you had actual clothes. Spending this much time to make not just good but great hidden footwear was something that non-knitters were always asking about, many of them brainwashed by big-box stores into thinking of socks only as a utility piece of footwear.

  Our society likes accomplishment to be right up front. We give awards, write report cards, give performance appraisals, and hold graduation ceremonies and anniversary parties so that people can be told that they are good at things and when they have measured up. The whole system sets you up to be judged by how the people around you feel about what you do, and how they feel about what you do doesn’t just have to do with what you’re doing. We are all only human, and humanity is almost always biased and judgmental. No matter where we live in the world, the people around you (and you) have internal scorecards, and we all look at each other and add up their points. Clean house? One point. Shaped like a supermodel? Three points. How you’re dressed? What you do? More points. As in all judgmental systems, you can lose points, too. For example, I am pretty sure that having a fridge with dried cottage cheese stuck to the inside doesn’t work in my favor, and I have long suspected that my hair isn’t gaining me much. Also, I may be too short.

  The system we all participate in, whether we mean to or not, makes knitting an interesting undertaking in the context of society at large. When I am finished with these fancy socks, the only person who will truly understand them or enjoy them for what they really are … is me. No points will be awarded in any way. (As a related point, your stash isn’t worth much either, and depending on who finds out about it, it may earn you a demerit.) It would be awesome for people to look at the work and be impressed. Fantastic if what I am doing was worth anything to the society that is sizing me up, but as I have accepted, there is very little prestige or power in being a good knitter. Not like having a Ph.D., being a CEO, or having an absolutely flat stomach after five babies. (Four points.) That means that I am knitting these socks for some other reason, because people don’t usually do things for no reason, however bizarre their personal motivation might be. I must be, because it is human nature, doing this because it gets me something, and if it just got me socks, I wouldn’t bother, since no matter what other people think, I have seen them at the store, well within my budget. I know that when I finish them my knitting friends will appreciate them, and my family (trained in the art of knit assessment) will tell me that they are grand, but truly I know that because they love me, my family would polish the truth and my friends would flatter me. The only voice that isn’t going to bother to lie to preserve our relationship is the voice of my inner self, and that’s who I’ve got to be doing this for.

  My inner self is, like most inner selves, a very harsh person who I am not always convinced is on my side. I have no idea why I can find something likable about almost everyone I meet, how I can usually find a way to come to them with compassion and understanding when they fail me, but I have the voice inside me be so critical when turned inward. When I see someone who has made a mistake out in the world, I do not usually (we all have our moments) call them an idiot and point and laugh, but should I make an error in judgment, up she comes, and before I have even a moment to defend myself or prepare, she’s called me all number of names, insulted my intellect, and told me (just to ice the cake) that I look terrible in these pants, and my mother has always loved my sister best. That’s a lot to withstand, and it’s a lot for a person to take, coming from all angles like that. It’s hard on my self-esteem and how I like myself, and besides, it’s redundant. Being the mother of teenagers means that I already have people to tell me that I don’t know what I’m doing.

  It occurred to me though, that when I am knitting that sock, my inner self, like society at large, pretty much ignores me, and maybe that’s what I’m getting while I’m knitting something like this. It feels like it repairs some of the damage done by this month’s cover of Cosmo (those can’t be real) and my failure to be all that society has laid out. I am a good knitter, if a terrible everything else, and this is a great sock. My knitting self-esteem, I realized, might be a whole lot healthier than my regular self-esteem, and the more I thought about that, the more it made a whole lot of sense. My knitting self-esteem is unfettered by my physical self, the Barbie I had when I was six, or the media’s constant messages about the size of my arse, what sort of clothes I wear, and whether or not I wear accessories while I clean my already spotless house and smile while I do it. Knitting doesn’t think you need to lose ten pounds, knitting doesn’t think you’re getting older. Knitting doesn’t even give a crap if you get fired or divorced. The only thing that matters in knitting is knitting. You’re either doing it or not, you’re either right or not, either that is two inches in ribbing or it is not, and I think that’s why it’s so good for my self-esteem.

  When I knit well and make beautiful things or finish things, it reminds me that I’m a winner and a person who gets things done. It’s healing and supportive, and I know picking up a piece of knitting and doing something right hundreds of times in a row, or eventually finishing a sweater and looking at how I was competent over and over and over again, I think that’s got to start leaking. I think if your self-esteem is a little bit bashed up, then knitting could help you fix that. That maybe if you could change what was possible for yourself in one way, then maybe that would leak into all the other parts of your life. Knitting could be a phone line that rings straight into the kitche
n of your inner self and says, “Hello? I just wanted to call and tell you that you’re wrong about me. I’m great, and I have the socks to prove it.”

  Every person I have ever met feels deep down that if the world really knew them, if the world really knew what they were thinking or how they felt or about the mistakes they have made, if someone really found out the deepest, most true things about you, or if your inner self was allowed to make calls out, then all those people wouldn’t love you. They couldn’t love you really. This feeling is the reason that philosophers and religious leaders, mentors and mothers have been telling their lambs forever that it doesn’t matter what you think. It is only what you do that matters. It is enough to do the right thing, or a good thing, no matter what you are thinking, and the message knitting sends to that inner voice in your head is a simple one: “You are competent. You are doing the right thing. You are doing it over and over and over again. You are not making a mistake, and if you do, there is a way out. Good job. Also, great socks. You’re lucky to have ‘em.” And when you hear that, it can resonate and grow through you, and maybe, if you knit enough stitches in a row with that level of clear skill? Maybe the cover of Cosmo won’t matter to you so much, and you’ll tell your husband that it’s his damn time to do the dishes because fair is fair and you’re worth it. Or not.

  Personal growth through the actual growth of knitting. It’s proof. It is tiny but real accomplishment, it is order out of chaos, it is usefulness drawn out of string. This is a small power, but one that you have, and as long as you are knitting, you can tell that inner voice to stuff a sock in it.