an old post about mother love
In a week or a little more, I will be a mother. I came across this post, written for another blog, about knitting for my mother (2/2/06). I'm posting it here and now because it seems appropriate, and because I have been blog-AWOL for awhile.
My relationship with my mother has been complicated for a very long time. As I prepare to be a mother, I am now conscious of all the ways I can let my child down without ever meaning to, with all the best intentions. Forgive me, mom, for being hard on you, and thank you for all your good intentions.
I’m knitting a pair of socks for my mother. I don’t like them very much. They weren’t intended for my mother. They began with an experiment in dyeing yarn with Kool-Aid, and because Kool Aid makes its chemical colors garishly bright to appeal to children, the yarn was a mud of uncommitted but distinct stripes of grape, kiwi green, turquoise blue, and 1970s pink. The 1970s pink was familiar precisely because of my mother’s love for it, the shade of most of my public dresses until I finally said no more and rebelled against lace. I chose the yarn for these socks (my third pair ever) because I wanted to learn a new knitting technique, making two socks at one time, and didn't want to spare more valued yarn on something where mistakes were so likely to happen.
But when my mother saw the socks at Thanksgiving, she loved them. Of course she did—they were all the colors I rebelled against, the soft tenuous colors that she clothed herself in my whole life, the colors she always wanted for me to love. She likes faint things: faint living, faint colors, faint powers of persuasion. Glad to have a home for these socks that wouldn’t remain in my drawer, I said, they’re yours. But something happened as I spent the next months finishing them. They were, like all knitted garments intended to become a gift, a reminder of the recipient. As you stitch away, leaving microsopics of flesh on them and wearing away your already sketchy carpal tunnel, you’re giving something more than just the end pair of socks (which, if I were honest, have a pointy heel that would never accommodate my broad back of foot). You're weaving in thoughts, intentions, hopes, wishes, fears, for the one who receives them.
Last night, several inches from completion, I turned my attention back to the first row of these socks—a ridge of stitches before the crinkly rib. I did what I do with all balls of yarn before deciding to purchase: I rubbed the sock against my face. The first row, tight and even, torn out more than once while I tried to make just one thing in my life perfect, for once—not compromising or deciding I wouldn’t mind later—was a masterwork. A small one, nothing like the whole bins of garments the most well-blogged knitters turn out, but my own small one. I am grateful to have a masterwork to give to my mother. I look at the sock and think, it will be warmer than the socks she has. She needs warm socks.
A week or so after I started these socks, but before my mother had claimed them, she did let me take her shopping, a rare occasion--she hardly ever lets me buy her things, and when she does, she rarely wears it (like all Depression-era mothers, she always saves the nice things for later). I resorted to subterfuge to get her there: Mom, I need to buy a bathmat, so you can take a shower for church. Our tub is really slippery. (We’d already had one fall that resulted in Dad wearing a bloody headwrap to Thanksgiving dinner.) Shopping trips are also minefields--reminders of days we shopped together for dance dresses and school clothes, reminders for both of us of how much she needs (why she needs so much and is so poorly cared for is a long and rotten story), and how uncomfortable it is to have your child provide necessities. I bought her jeans, a turtleneck, and a fleece jacket that, it turns out, go with the socks. It was all she would let me do. She was genuinely delighted and grateful in the way that breaks my heart. I wish so much I could change things for her, but I've failed at making any real difference in her life, though I've been trying for years. So I do what I can do: I give her a pair of socks.
I sent the socks off to my mother shortly after writing this. She loves them, and so I learned that the yarn wasn't a mistake--it was for her all along. We can't always give the people we love the exact thing they need, or enough of it, mothers or children alike. Sometimes we just love them imperfectly and fully, do the best we can and hope they know this. That's what I'm thinking as I wait for baby B to be born.
My relationship with my mother has been complicated for a very long time. As I prepare to be a mother, I am now conscious of all the ways I can let my child down without ever meaning to, with all the best intentions. Forgive me, mom, for being hard on you, and thank you for all your good intentions.
I’m knitting a pair of socks for my mother. I don’t like them very much. They weren’t intended for my mother. They began with an experiment in dyeing yarn with Kool-Aid, and because Kool Aid makes its chemical colors garishly bright to appeal to children, the yarn was a mud of uncommitted but distinct stripes of grape, kiwi green, turquoise blue, and 1970s pink. The 1970s pink was familiar precisely because of my mother’s love for it, the shade of most of my public dresses until I finally said no more and rebelled against lace. I chose the yarn for these socks (my third pair ever) because I wanted to learn a new knitting technique, making two socks at one time, and didn't want to spare more valued yarn on something where mistakes were so likely to happen.
But when my mother saw the socks at Thanksgiving, she loved them. Of course she did—they were all the colors I rebelled against, the soft tenuous colors that she clothed herself in my whole life, the colors she always wanted for me to love. She likes faint things: faint living, faint colors, faint powers of persuasion. Glad to have a home for these socks that wouldn’t remain in my drawer, I said, they’re yours. But something happened as I spent the next months finishing them. They were, like all knitted garments intended to become a gift, a reminder of the recipient. As you stitch away, leaving microsopics of flesh on them and wearing away your already sketchy carpal tunnel, you’re giving something more than just the end pair of socks (which, if I were honest, have a pointy heel that would never accommodate my broad back of foot). You're weaving in thoughts, intentions, hopes, wishes, fears, for the one who receives them.
Last night, several inches from completion, I turned my attention back to the first row of these socks—a ridge of stitches before the crinkly rib. I did what I do with all balls of yarn before deciding to purchase: I rubbed the sock against my face. The first row, tight and even, torn out more than once while I tried to make just one thing in my life perfect, for once—not compromising or deciding I wouldn’t mind later—was a masterwork. A small one, nothing like the whole bins of garments the most well-blogged knitters turn out, but my own small one. I am grateful to have a masterwork to give to my mother. I look at the sock and think, it will be warmer than the socks she has. She needs warm socks.
A week or so after I started these socks, but before my mother had claimed them, she did let me take her shopping, a rare occasion--she hardly ever lets me buy her things, and when she does, she rarely wears it (like all Depression-era mothers, she always saves the nice things for later). I resorted to subterfuge to get her there: Mom, I need to buy a bathmat, so you can take a shower for church. Our tub is really slippery. (We’d already had one fall that resulted in Dad wearing a bloody headwrap to Thanksgiving dinner.) Shopping trips are also minefields--reminders of days we shopped together for dance dresses and school clothes, reminders for both of us of how much she needs (why she needs so much and is so poorly cared for is a long and rotten story), and how uncomfortable it is to have your child provide necessities. I bought her jeans, a turtleneck, and a fleece jacket that, it turns out, go with the socks. It was all she would let me do. She was genuinely delighted and grateful in the way that breaks my heart. I wish so much I could change things for her, but I've failed at making any real difference in her life, though I've been trying for years. So I do what I can do: I give her a pair of socks.
I sent the socks off to my mother shortly after writing this. She loves them, and so I learned that the yarn wasn't a mistake--it was for her all along. We can't always give the people we love the exact thing they need, or enough of it, mothers or children alike. Sometimes we just love them imperfectly and fully, do the best we can and hope they know this. That's what I'm thinking as I wait for baby B to be born.
posted by nann at 10:34 AM
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