Mom, Mom, Mom #41: Knitting is the New Me

Here’s my latest column for the Alameda Sun, scheduled to run today, January 28, 2010:

On Thanksgiving, a friend handed me two knitting needles and some yarn and showed me the basic knitting stitch and I started. I didn’t tell her that I couldn’t knit, that I had tried to, years ago in Ireland, only to submit in failure. I didn’t even say, “I can’t do this,” which is what I usually tell myself when it comes to being crafty. I just sat next to her on the couch among the group gathered in the living room and started. It was easier than I remembered. And, I enjoyed it, because we were just sitting and talking about how fabulous the meal was and how full we all were, but I was doing something. It was a revelation that I could be productive and accomplish something while seemingly just sitting there, not running around in a frenzy and without the aid of a computer. I took the wool home and made a short scarf. I’m thinking of hanging it somewhere in the house like businesses do with their first dollar bill.

It’s been two months and I’m still knitting. I’ve made a few scarves and I’ve almost completed a pair of fingerless mittens. Okay, so I used the wrong yarn (yarn has weights! Who knew?) and I can’t quite get the thumb right, but I am not afraid to pull it all out and start over, a lesson that is well taken in life as well as knitting.

I’ve been completely swept up by this knitting. It has astounded my family and friends, who know too well my previous crafting exploits. It amuses my Dad because my Mother took up crocheting when I was in college. There are drawers and closets chock full of her creations in my Dad’s house still, years after she’s been gone, doilies and afghans, too many to really use. We kids already have many samples of my Mother’s prolific handiwork and now my Dad doesn’t know what to do with the remainder.

I don’t quite know why knitting has worked for me at this time, but it has given me hope for my future. Maybe there really is a season for everything and I haven’t learned or done all there is to learn or do for me specifically. At 20, I wasn’t ready for knitting, but 30 years later I am. What didn’t make sense then is crystal clear now. Yes, I know, it paints a stereotypical picture of the old lady sitting, knitting. I just need a rocking chair. My mother seemed so old to me when she started crocheting, but I think she was just a few years older than I am now.

There are many differences between my Mother’s crocheting and my knitting. My sisters and I thought it was fine for her to crochet, but we had no interest in learning how to do it. Today, there are many nights when two of my girls pick up needles and knit along with me. With Web sites like Etsy.com (a place to buy and sell handmade items) flourishing and the economy tanking, I think crafting has experienced a resurgence and my kids are more accepting and willing to jump in.

More important for me is that I am starting to believe that there’s more out there that I can try. Maybe something is happening in my brain as I age that’s allowing me to do things I couldn’t before. Maybe I could really learn a language now. If I can figure out a knitting pattern—incredibly convoluted with strange symbols and abbreviations—maybe my brain has shifted enough for me to take on Italian or improve my very weak and rusty French.

I am thinking about some of the physical things I could never accomplish before but might try now. (Another of the differences between my Mother who was housebound and severely physically limited and me.) Oddly, surfing comes to mind and not the kind you do on the Internet. In fact, I’ve started a list of activities that I’ve either tried before, like knitting, or never tried, of things I can say, “I can do this.” Just because I started.

Mom, Mom, Mom #30: Looking for the Adventure Hook

This ran in the August 28, 2008 (8/28/08) Alameda Sun. 

Looking for an Angle

I’m looking for a crop of lavender, a trip to Italy/India/Bali or the desire to do something unique every day for a year to kick some life into my life. As the new school year approaches and I take a look at the prospects of the adventure that lies ahead-my three girls are now in middle school in the sixth and eighth grades-I realize I face another ten months of the same old, same old:  homework, driving around town to soccer practices, games and dance lessons, the continued repercussions of divorce and a myriad of jobs to pay the bills. It may be busy but it’s not an exciting life I lead. In fact everyone else’s seems so much more interesting.

Just stroll through the many bookstores we have in town or scroll through the pages of Amazon.com. There are hundreds of writers who have taken their really interesting daily lives and translated them into books, some of which have ended up on the best-seller list, and changed the lives of the authors themselves in the process.

I need some kind of hook to make my life more interesting and then I need to write a book about it. Being the single mother of three kids is not enough to get publishers interested in my life; I need to incorporate some kind of twist, like growing crops in my back yard and then selling them to pay for the solar panels that will keep me off Alameda Power and Telecom’s grid for a year (for the sustainable living angle).  Unfortunately, that seems to have been done before. Novelist Barbara Kingsolver published a non-fiction book with her husband and daughter called Animal, Mineral, Miracle about their sustainable life in Appalachia.

For some women, travel provided the catalyst for writing the best seller, but our summer trips to New Jersey, Boston and Vermont are not exotic or emotional enough. The most successful version of the scenario is Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, an account of her yearlong travels in Italy, India and Bali to forget her own divorce and find herself. Not only does she find herself, she falls in love with the man of her dreams and writes the book that gets her on Oprah twice in one season. Julia Roberts is going to play her in the movie version of her life. How’s that for a kick in the pants? I would be really jealous, but in Gilbert’s earnest appearances on Oprah, she seems a little bewildered by her sudden fame and fortune. And, she is now living in New Jersey, so I have to like her.

It would be better if I moved to some rural destination and tried something new. In The Unlikely Lavender Queen: A Memoir of Unexpected Blossoming, Jeannie Ralston followed her National Geographer photographer husband to the Hill Country of Texas and had to carry out his harebrained idea of growing lavender, just like they do in Provence, France. (Just imagine that late-night discussion at their dinner table. “Honey, I have this great idea…”) Sure enough, while said husband was away on assignment most of the time, Ralston not only worked to raise their young sons, reconverted a barn into a showcase home and still carried on her freelance writing for big national magazines, but also created a successful lavender business and converted a region in Texas to a lavender-growing axis.

Kingsolver advises would-be writers on her Web site, “…You’ve got to have some big, true THING you are dying to tell the world.” While my girls are either getting accustomed to a big middle school or making plans to finish eighth grade and start thinking about high school, I’ve decided to find my big, true thing and work on my book. I may need some time to determine the concept. How about this:  single mother wind surfs every day for a year, discovers her inner Jacques Cousteau and saves the environment. I just don’t think “one woman’s quest to find excitement in Alameda” is a big enough draw.  Stay tuned.