for drug and alcohol abuse. I suspected he would never forgive me for this act, but I also couldn’t see that I had many other options.
While he was still sobering up in jail I submitted the paperwork to have him committed. I had to write on the commitment papers that I felt he was a danger to both himself and others. It was by far the most agonizing writing I have ever done, the most horrific paper I have ever felt it necessary to sign.
During his commitment, I began to crochet an afghan for him. I had crocheted on and off since I was a child, but this was the first time I’d taken it up almost out of desperation. I felt helpless; everything seemed so chaotic. I could hardly get a sentence out during visits to the hospital where he was being confined before he’d curse and tell me to go away. From the dark and angry place where he lived, he couldn’t hear or receive my words or love. As a mother, this rejection was painful; as someone who had spent her life making poems and essays, stitching words, if you will, to speak, the failure of my own words made me feel wretched. I couldn’t console even myself with words; the feeling of what was happening seemed so raw, I couldn’t bear, then, to try to capture it in words. Even now, reliving those events to write this essay, is excruciatingly painful.
If I felt my words had no power then, or if I could find no way to bring them to power during those black times, if I couldn’t seem to pick up a pen, I could still pick up a crochet hook. I could count rows, stitches. I could bear to think of what my son’s life had become while I crocheted, the murmuring of my counting in the background.
And so I began crocheting for him, as my mother had for all her children so many years earlier. I made the afghan of colors I thought he would like in a pattern I thought he might like. The project kept me sane for the month he was in the hospital, and gave me something both aesthetic and sensible to do with my hands, my grief, my wordlessness. I couldn’t solve his problems, but I could unscramble the design dilemmas of an afghan; I could hook him a gift that could stitch a mother’s love into the silent weight and heft of yarn.
I chose worsted weight wool, the right weight for something you want to give warmth: a thick, but not chunky yarn. I don’t remember the precise pattern or color scheme, but I do remember blacks, purples and yellows: in my mind, yellow for hope, black for grief, purple, one of his favorite colors. A repeating series of puff stitches that shaped large ovals that looked something like eyes. Even now, so very many years later, I remember how satisfying it was to sit on my sofa in the evenings when it was very cold outside to work on this afghan. The snow falling, fire blazing in the fireplace, the afghan growing under my fingers, slowly, day by day. Sometimes I thought of my mother and all those nights she had crocheted while my father was drinking himself to death. I hoped some intervention would save my son from that fall, but I was beginning to feel all but powerless to help.
Once the pattern was ingrained in my fingers I didn’t have to think about it so much; it felt at times as if I were in a trance, my fingers making the same movements over and over again: Yarn over, insert hook into the stitch; yarn over, pull through; yarn over, pull through again; yarn over, pull all loops off the hook; half double-crochet formed for the background. Three rows of that. Then the puff stitches: five yarn-overs and pull-throughs that made a stitch that puffed out, just as the name suggests. I crocheted through the nights and thought about my son. Yellow. Yarn over, one. Maybe he’ll never speak to me again. Insert hook into stitch. It’s not about you, Sheryl, it’s about him. Maybe the forced twelve-step program will help. Yarn over, two. At least he isn’t with the guy who tapes needles to his guitar. Pull through. How long will he be angry, will the meds help? Yarn over three. Are they treating him well? Pull through. What else could I have done. All loops off hook. Repeat for Black, Purple. And on and on, over and over, hundreds of rows, thousands of stitches.
When he was released from the hospital, he was required to continue in a twelve-step program, and to have a stable place to live. He stayed with me for a while in Iowa where we’d been living, then moved to Texas to be with his father, who bought him a beer for his 20th birthday, and so it started all over again, the drinking, the drugs, the anger. He stopped taking the medications that had been prescribed to him while he’d been in the hospital, where, in addition to drug and alcohol abuse, he’d been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
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