do, maybe you tighten them when angry or hold the tension a bit more loosely when you’re sad. Maybe you’re thinking of someone you love who’s not lost but still alive, your focus to create something beautiful for him, to stitch your affection into the yarn.
While I grew to trust words to stitch the wounds in my heart, my mother preferred crocheting. The comfort of the ball of yarn next to you, the satisfaction of it growing smaller as your project takes on shape and dimension; the wonder of the colors as they reveal themselves in a stitch, especially when you have a skein of multi-colored or self-striping yarn; the rhythm of the changes of colors and of the stitching itself; the sensuous sliding of the hook into the opening of the stitch; the pulling and looping and yarning over; the comforting feel of the completed stitch; these are some of the reasons I imagine she came to love crochet.
I make my living now as a poet and teacher of writing, although I also crochet, and I can’t help but see connections between writing and crocheting. When crocheting a long row of single crochets, the rhythm of it feels to me like a kind of poetic meter, an extended trochaic foot, one that slides around, has a bit of a southern accent maybe, with slightly too many syllables—enter, yarn over, pull, enter yarn over pull—. It feels as if you’re weaving a poem. A row of crocheting is not unlike a line of poetry where foot and meter are important, the turning chain like the rhymed syllable of the last word of an iambic pentameter line. If you’re working with color, the colors must echo and complement each other the same way words do in a poem or lyric essay.
I first turned to writing poems to find vessels to contain the chaos of the family into which I was born; poems offered a way to present a gift to the world that often came from those early days’ tragedies. Crocheting has become a force almost equal to poetry as an expressive art for me, since both are creative acts that can be at once calming and transformative, both empowering in times of crises.
The truth is, of course, that women have often used fiber art—weaving, knitting or crocheting—as a tool for getting through difficult times. The earliest literary example we have might be Penelope, Odysseus’ wife, who promises she will remarry once she finishes weaving a burial shroud for Laertes. During the day, she works on the shroud, but unravels it at night, hoping Odysseus will return before she is forced to marry one of her property-hungry suitors. This story also points out that it’s not the product of the weaving that’s important, rather the process itself.
Several recent books link crochet’s older sister, knitting, to psychological and spiritual recovery. Ann Hood’s memoir, Comfort: A Journey through Grief, and her novel, The Knitting Circle, to pick two of my own favorites, are both inspired by her own experience learning to knit to help recover from the unexpected death of her young daughter. Susan Gordon Lydon, in Knitting Heaven and Earth, writes about using knitting and needlework to heal from the grief of death as well as her own diagnosis of breast cancer. Likewise, crochet blogger Kathryn Vercillo’s site, Crochet Concupiscence, is full of stories of many who crocheted their way through grief; she herself has written of how she crocheted her way out of depression.
My own drug of choice is crochet, not knitting, although most yarn stores, pattern magazines, and books privilege knitting. Crocheting is in my blood because that’s the art my mother taught me, and it’s what her mother taught her. I learned to hold a crochet hook around the same age I learned to wield a pen, and it feels as natural to hold a crochet hook as it does a pen.
Knitting and crocheting are sometimes confused, as they both involve yarn and may lead to similar projects: hats, scarves, gloves, sweaters, afghans, blankets. I often crochet in public—it’s a great way to sit through bad poetry readings if you are not at liberty to leave—and am constantly responding to questions of “What are you knitting?” with I’m crocheting. Both arts involve manipulating loops of yarn, although knitters use two knitting needles, while crocheters employ a single tool, the crochet hook. Crocheters enjoy dozens of kinds of stitches; knitters have only two. Crocheting uses more yarn than knitting, and has more architecture. Running your hands along a crocheted item you’ll feel the bumps of the stitch, which are in higher relief than those of knitting.
I now crochet as much, if not more, than my mother, and I’m grateful for her early lessons. I’m lucky to be able to afford the kinds of yarns my mother could not. I like to use kettle-dyed, natural yarn (as opposed to synthetics) for my crochet projects as I prefer the slightly coarser look and variegations in color; I like handspun yarns such as those from Malabrigo, a woman’s collective from Uruguay, that vary in lovely ways both in the shades of the color of the yarn and in the diameter of the yarn itself so that it might be thick at one part and thin in another. As the yarn runs through my fingers I think of the animals or plants from which it came, and I feel more connected with the earth. I also like supporting the women in rural areas of South America, many of whom would live in poverty without the ability to make and sell this yarn.
Unfortunately, a love of crocheting is not the only thing I share with my mother. Like her, I also gave birth to a son who would grow into a troubled teenager, and whose journey, like my brother’s, deeper and deeper into drugs and alcohol would dominate my waking hours for many years and haunt me in midlife even more than I was already haunted by the deaths of my brother and father.
Ten years ago, Gray, who was then nineteen and had been growing increasingly hostile to everyone who loved him during his teen years, took a turn for the worse, exhibiting a kind of emotional cruelty I can hardly bear, still, after all these years, to re-enter. He seemed to be spiraling into blackness; he’d dropped out of high school, refused to find work, and had been picked up on several occasions for public drunkenness and shoplifting. Hanging out with a crowd deep into hard drugs, one of his friends who regularly shot up heroin was so proud of it that he had taped needles onto his guitar. My son was jobless and living in my basement, although he had talked a doctor into giving him a prescription for Adderall so that he could get up in the mornings and look for a job, which he never did. I would sometimes find him and a girlfriend asleep in the basement in the mornings, emptied wine bottles on the floor, they unable to rise. I doled out the Adderall, one a day, until he visited his father, from whom I was divorced, in Texas, for a couple of weeks. He took the prescription bottle with him, and when I asked for it back on his return, he claimed to have lost it.
One night, when I was out of town and he was home alone, the garage caught fire and burned to the ground. The house itself was scorched on one side and could have also gone up with my son asleep inside, the fire-chief told me later, had someone who witnessed the blaze not called the fire department. The fire-chief also said my son had been so “inebriated” when he interviewed him about the fire he could hardly understand what he was saying. Years later Gray would confess that he and friends had had a party in the garage that night; they had all gotten drunk, and he’d fought with one of the friends, who had later set the garage on fire in retaliation. Much later, he would tell another friend of mine that he’d lit the fire himself.
When I returned home from my trip, in addition to the charred space where the garage used to be, I found bottles of beer stashed everywhere in the house, in record cabinets, clothes drawers, under beds. I found evidence online through chat boxes he’d left open on my computer that he’d been stealing copious amounts of cough syrup, wine and beer. He was advising friends on how to shoplift as well as how to mix drugs to achieve various kinds of highs. When I confronted him one afternoon about what I’d found, he called me a stupid fucking bitch, and locked himself in his room. Later that night I found a message he’d left for me on the desk top of my computer in about 32-point bold: I HATE YOU. I HOPE YOU DIE.
Not long after this confrontation he wound up in jail overnight because of a drunken fight that left him with two black eyes and, later, an altercation with a policeman while he was still drunk. That night, while he was in jail, one of his former girlfriends confessed to me how worried she was about him, his drinking, the drugs (specifically Adderall) she said he was doling out to friends, selling, and abusing it himself. She confirmed my suspicions that he had not
