Free-Range Knitter Read online

  At three years we had to move from our apartment to a house since you had developed an intense determination to leap from the balcony. (You felt that only stupid children were injured in falls. Smart girls landed on the grass and were just fine. Since you were sure you were a smart girl, we moved.) At four you were a good reader and a decent knitter and frequently defeated adults with your keen intellect. By the time you were five, my little prodigy, my life with you was sort of like a game of Survivor since there was almost nobody alive, adult or child, who could outwit, outlast, or outplay you.

  By six you had discovered the full force of your greatest weapon, your profoundly endearing charm, and by seven we were in the teacher’s office at school while she explained that you were the loveliest, most darling child she had ever met but that we were really going to have to help them bring you on board with the system. (What an idea. Why didn’t I think of that? I resisted the urge to laugh out loud at her.)

  By ten you were off and running in a broad social circle, largely immune to maternal remonstration, and no matter what happened or caught fire or blew up or broke, you kept saying the same thing to me that you always have: “Mum. Relax. I can handle it.” I kept a list of emergency numbers in my jeans pocket at all times, just in case you were wrong.

  By your teens I spent a lot of my mothering time wondering why you had to reinvent the wheel all the time. (I should have looked up the definition of adolescence and saved myself a little stinking time.) I had already learned everything you were experimenting with. Why wouldn’t you just do what I told you? I knew that boys aren’t always sincere and that if a girl is gossiping to you about everybody else, you can bet she’s gossiping about you to them. I knew that other girl was a liar (and her shirt was totally skanky); I knew what that boy wanted. (Joe knew, too.) I knew that if you procrastinated on an essay you would regret it, and I knew that if you really invested in school your life would be so much easier later on. I knew you would absolutely get caught if you skipped science, and I knew that your supercharm would only save you a few times. Your teen years turned into me following you around trying to tell you all the things I had learned the hard way, desperately trying to save you any kind of pain at all, with you staring at me like I was an idiot who didn’t know anything and proceeding to learn everything the hard, painful way anyway. I don’t know about you, but I think those years sucked. I think I knit a million pairs of socks trying to keep my mouth shut and take the edge off.

  I have spent the last eighteen years being awestruck by the wonder that is you, someone I made in my spare time, and trying desperately to deal best with your epic personality and qualities. Tenacity. Intelligence. Constructive discontent. Persistence. Sensitivity. A fantastic sense of humor. Independence. Mercy. Fearlessness. Kindness. Equity.

  Now, these qualities are terrible qualities in a child. North America wants children (especially little girls) to be polite. Polite, obedient, and pliable, should they be allowed to choose. Kids who fight back and challenge you, say “no,” and think for themselves are hard to raise and not thought well of at all. We all talk about how “good” an obedient child is, and it struck me at some point while I was raising you that I really couldn’t have a child who did as she was told all the time and then expect you to suddenly turn into an adult who was assertive, independent, and free thinking. I realized you couldn’t tell a kid, “Do what I tell you,” praise her for obedience, and then turn right around when she becomes a grownup and suddenly say, “Think for yourself” and condemn adults who are still compliant.

  In short, I realized that people are adults for a lot longer than they are kids and that it makes more sense to cultivate wonderful adult skills than the traits that make kids easy to take care of. (Mostly I realized this, my child, because despite my best attempts to get some desirable kid traits out of you, you wouldn’t do otherwise.)

  Over the last eighteen years, eighteen years in which I believe that you and I have tested each other’s patience at least once a day, often to the point of tears, I have often gotten through all of them by telling myself, “These are great qualities in an adult. She’s going to be an adult longer than she is going to be three (or six, or nine, or thirteen, or fifteen). Do not kill her before she is finished.” This strategy has helped me a great deal. (I don’t know what strategy you used to keep from killing me.)

  Now, after all this, after all those days that I didn’t book a plane ticket to Belize because I was holding on to the idea of an adult you, suddenly she’s here. You’re an adult. A beautiful legal adult who (at least on paper) doesn’t need her mother. You can vote. You can move across the country. You can start a business or join the Peace Corps or—mercy, my child, you can do whatever wonderful thing you want, and you can do it all without my permission.

  I am scared to death.

  Motherhood is the only occupation I can think of where your eventual goal is to put yourself out of business and make it so your customers don’t need you anymore, and I have swung back and forth these last few years, hoping one moment that you will leave (I admit, we both probably know what days those were) and wishing the next moment that you will never leave and I will be allowed to try to keep you safe and with me forever.

  While I am not sure that I am entirely okay with this growing-up thing, I know now that I have to at least start letting you go a little bit. I need to worry less about you and send you more out there, and I will. (Not all at once, though. The world is freakin’ huge.) Please try to be patient with me; it’s so hard for me to let go of my job. Try to remember that up until now if something happened to you, it was my fault, and they could put me in prison for it, and in my defense, you are my eldest and the kid I had to practice all of this on.

  I hope, dear Amanda, that all of this leaping without looking and enthusiastic going forward has taught you to at least scan the ground a little as you fly, and I’m going to try and trust that you know how to pick yourself up if you land hard after all, all of the things that have made it a challenging, crazy ride to be your mother …

  These are terrific qualities in an adult. Boldly go, my dear heart. Boldly go.

  Poor Planning

  As I walk and travel around the city, I knit. Nothing complicated, because I am not so bright as to be able to do anything very complicated while I’m walking, and also because I live in a big, bustling, busy city where nice but rather vacant people who wander around knitting and not looking where they are going are likely to get splattered by a taxi or something. (There was also an incident in which I walked squarely into a pole while cabling, which I prefer not to speak of and would rather you thought of as a “teachable moment.”) In light of these urban dangers, and the danger that I am to myself, I keep the walking and transit knitting simple. All I can manage, if I value both my life and my reputation, is a simple stockinette sock, and I do.

  When I am walking around the city knitting, I usually keep my yarn in a wee bag that hangs from my beltloop or wrist. It’s got a top that gathers up so that when you yank another length of yarn free your yarn can’t leap from the bag and land in a puddle or something, and I think these bags are tremendously handy, and in fact I have several of them. This day, as I was leaving the house, I realized that all of my walking-around knitting bags were full of sock knitting that I didn’t want to take with me. You know how it goes. That sock needs stitches picked up at the heel, and I can’t pick up stitches on the bus because it is too bumpy. The other one can’t come because I think it’s time to start the decreases for the toes, but I have to try it on before I am sure, and thanks to that day last summer I totally know what people on the bus think of someone who slips off her right shoe and sock and then slips on a toeless sock with a spiky crown of deadly looking needles stuck in it. It’s not good for my image, and I understand now that this sort of public behavior is likely one of the reasons why the other parents point at me and whisper at school meetings, but I digress. The point is that none of the other socks would do.

/>   I was also running a little bit late, and if I took even a moment to dump some knitting out of a bag and then put knitting in, then I would probably miss the aforementioned bus, and then I wouldn’t get back from downtown in time to get to the school, and frankly, I am tuned in enough with the parenting thing to know that showing up late to get my kid, disheveled, weird, and flushed from running, is probably the other main reason why the other parents point and whisper at school meetings. Determined to get it together and remembering that being late because you prioritized a half-knit sock is not well understood by the rest of humanity, I simply took the sock I wanted to (halfway down the leg; perfect walking and bus knitting) and rammed the yarn into my pocket.

  By the time I got to the bus stop near my house, I was remembering why I had bought the wee bags. The yarn wouldn’t stay in my pocket. Every so often when I’d pull a length free, the ball would tumble from my pocket, landing behind me. (Not every time, mind you, because that would have taught me a lesson. No, no, this was at random intervals, so my occasional success would keep me trying.) I’d be alerted to the trouble when my knitting was suddenly tugged or even yanked from my hands because the ball was hung up on something behind me, my sock tumbling to the ground or slingshotting through the air, needles glittering threateningly in the sun before clattering to the ground. If the ball didn’t get hung up, and the yarn kept pulling neatly from the center of the ball, then it might be rescued by a kindly passer-by who would spot the thing, an ever-lengthening leash of yards of bright wool, unwinding as I wandered away, happily knitting while trailing three-ply sock yarn through the city. I admit that although my yarn was becoming ever dirtier and vaguely damp, I did love the way that the good Samaritans all said the same thing—“Excuse me? You’ve dropped your …”—and then trailed off, just like the yarn, because they kindly started that sentence before realizing that they really weren’t entirely certain what I had dropped. As entertaining as that part was, when three people had handed the yarn back to me in a half block, I decided that maybe walking and knitting just wasn’t going to work out today, and I put the needles and sock into my pocket along with the fugitive yarn.

  On the bus I braved it for a while, the ball perched on my lap where it couldn’t go anywhere (as long as I remembered to put a hand on it as the bus stopped and started), and when I got to the subway I just gathered the ball, needles, and sock up into a wad I held clutched to my chest as I made my way through the busy station. Knitting again on the subway, I tried tucking the yarn under my arm, which did keep the yarn more stationary but garnered more odd looks from those watching me pull a seemingly endless length of string from my armpit.

  When I reached my destination I left my yarn under my arm as I walked, knowing for certain that in moments, when I reached my goal of the passport office, I would enter a seemingly endless queue of people, all destined to wait hours for the privilege of turning in their travel papers. (They would all be frustrated and hostile. I would be knitting.) I walked through the lobby, approached the elevator, pushed the button, and waited, knitting as I did. The elevator came, and the door opened on an empty elevator. I stepped in and pushed the button for the seventh floor, turned to face the doors, and realized suddenly that my ball of sock yarn was no longer tucked under my arm, and I panicked. After an hour of finding my yarn behind me at regular intervals, it hit me that I must have dropped the yarn on my way through the lobby (or worse, perhaps before I had gone through the revolving doors to the lobby), and as the doors began to close, I leapt off the elevator toward my abandoned yarn.

  Sadly, as with so many decisions I have made without much information, I was wrong, and a split second later when I threw myself out of the elevator and didn’t see my yarn in the lobby (nor tangled magnificently in the revolving door), I realized my mistake. Whirling on my heels, sock in my hands, dread filling me entirely, I looked back in the elevator, and in the tiny moment before the doors closed tight, I saw it. My single ball of sock yarn, sitting in almost the exact center of the elevator floor. With that, the doors closed tight, and I stood there, looking at the tail of yarn connected to my knitting snaking into the closed elevator door.

  Clearly, this was a mistake, and as I recovered from the shock, I remembered that I’d pushed the button for the seventh floor before leaping away from my sock yarn to find my sock yarn (this was no time to wallow in irony, although it was noted). I lurched forward and frantically began to push the button. I hit it with a violent zeal, as though the degree of force would somehow tell the elevator how very, very much I wished it would open again. Long seconds passed, and as they did, I continued to punch the button, my yarn still hanging limply out of the seam of the doors. What, I wondered frantically, was happening inside there? This was a disaster. Was seven floors of yarn pulling from the center of the ball and snaking up the inside of the elevator as it moved? Had the yarn broken? If seven floors of yarn had pulled free, what was going to happen when the elevator came back down? Would the yarn tangle inside, seven floors’ worth of fine hand-dyed merino winding itself around the mechanical guts of the thing? I paused for a moment, my hand hovering over the button. Oh dear. I hadn’t really thought that through. What if yards and yards and yards of yarn were pulling out of the ball as I stood there, entangling themselves in the gears and pulleys of the elevator? I imagined the elevator coming to a grinding halt on the way back down with a handful of people inside. I imagined emergency services turning up and eventually freeing them, and then emerging from the utility room with fifty-five yards of my yarn in their hands while exclaiming, “Aha! This is the culprit!” and looking over and seeing me there, the incriminating sock still in my hand. It was going to be like the time I killed the washing machine pump while felting green slippers, then had to stand there guiltily writing a check for $400 while Joe watched the repair guy pull handfuls of green fibers out of it. This was going to be just like that. I stopped hitting the button. Maybe it was better if it just went to the seventh floor and stopped there. Maybe I should tell someone who could keep it there while I tried to explain that they had to find a way to retrieve my yarn before it tied up the whole system. I wondered what the police were going to charge me with. Misconduct? Mischief? Vandalism or damage to property? Oh God … the passport office was in this building. Was I on federal government property? The elevator proceeded, yarn passenger alone, all the way to the seventh floor without stopping.

  I stood there, looking at the “7” light, and thought for a second. I tried to calm myself down. Surely lots of people have had yarn accidents in and around elevators, right? If yarn were so dangerous as to be able to cripple city buildings and cause expensive damage, they wouldn’t just let me carry it around, right? As I stood there, in front of the doors, my umbilical cord of yarn curving from the sock in my hand to the black line dividing the doors, two things happened. First, a few people came up and stood with me, waiting for the elevator, and second, the elevator began to move downward again. I jumped, startled into action, and decided that I had to at least try to prevent disaster. Now that there were witnesses, I couldn’t just stand there. I imagined how my inaction would look at the trial. This round-faced man beside me, up on the stand saying, “And she did nothing, Your Honor, nothing. She knew the yarn was in there and what it could do, and she just stood there,” and then he would break off, dissolving into hitching sobs.

  This vision of my unpleasant future (a future in which all of my mother’s suspicions about the dangers of my wool issues were validated) prodded me into action, and as the incredulous witnesses watched, I tried to reel in the yarn through the crack in the door. I tugged, I pulled, I nervously watched the lights at the top—6, 5, 4—why wouldn’t it come? Was it already caught on the mysterious inner workings of the elevator? I smiled nervously at the witnesses, who were watching me with rather astonished faces. One woman’s mouth actually dropped open as I worked my hand closer to the door, hoping to ease even an inch of rescue. Down it came—3, 2—and I began to wonde
r whether I was going to escape. Perhaps when the door opened, the ball of yarn would be sitting there with the yarn simply severed by the door. (Part of me hoped not. I hate weaving in ends.) Or maybe the yards that had pulled free were hanging in a big loop down through the rest of elevator shaft. I could get someone to hold the door open as I wound it all back onto the ball. As long as no harm was done, I might be able to convince these people that I was just quirky and charming, not several mental tools short of a workbox. I glanced around at them. From the looks on their faces I could tell that quirky and charming wasn’t quite what I was pulling off at the moment. Never mind. I could recover. The bell chimed, the “L” button lit up, and at long last, the elevator doors made ready to slide open.

  I stepped forward, in front of the witnesses, and waited. I prepared myself for whatever I beheld when the door opened. I said a few words of thanks to whatever force may rule elevators, for allowing such a good ending, and I prepared to wind my fifty-five yards of sock yarn back up as quickly as I could so as to not inconvenience anyone any more than I had to. (It was going to be embarrassing enough. I could at least be efficient while I was odd.) The door slid open then, and the tail of yarn that had been pinched between the doors drifted back under its sock and lay there. No one came out. Not a single soul. So the yarn had broken. Well, that was unfortunate but was probably what saved the elevator from doom and me from possible charges. I was rather pleased that I wouldn’t have to look any weirder than I already did and could avoid explaining to these nice people that they would be allowed to carry on with their important business just as soon as I was done playing wool games with an elevator.