All Wound Up (22 page)

et me tell you a little something, a secret. I love getting up in the night, and I always have. I know that if you’ve got babies right now, you’re probably going to have trouble believing that, but it’s true. When my babies were little and woke me in the night, I got up with them, and but for the few nights when the sleep deprivation pushed me near the limits of survival, I loved it. The night has a lovely intimacy, and in the dark my baby and I were the only two people alive. I loved nursing them and rocking them and looking at their little fingers curled like unfurled moonflowers. (I know their father would tell you something different, that there were nights that I stood by the side of our bed with a screaming bundle of infuriated human and said, “You know, it’s not like she and I are the only two people alive. You could get up and take a turn,” but those were moments, not themes.)

The night has a certain sort of delicious loneliness. For those of us who like to be alone and find ourselves good company, but are beset by family and children all day, the night has opportunities. I know that if I stay up long enough, I’ll be alone. It’s a fetish that I indulge only occasionally as a married woman, since a pervasive desire to be alone can hurt the feelings of your spouse, but I’m writing this now, in the deep, dark quiet night, all alone, just my thoughts and me.

When I was a little girl, getting up in the night was understandably frowned upon, and even thwarted. My brother James was a serious nighthawk, and in being such, I think he had spoiled it for the rest of us. My mum still tells the story of him as a toddler, getting up in the night and wandering from his crib. Something woke her (likely instinct) and she discovered him standing on the stovetop in his plastic-footed jammies, trying to turn on the burners under cover of darkness. After that, the hallway had a strategically connived wall of empty apple juice cans set up as part barrier, part alarm, and any attempt to get by it toppled the cans and brought the fuzz down on you, even if you were just going to look out the front window to see how good your night vision was.

My fondest memory as a teen wasn’t of a stolen kiss or a broken curfew (though technically, I got both) but of a walk in the night. I stole out my bedroom window and away with the boy next door. With my wool as my witness we got up to no big mischief but simply walked through the park in the night, through magic fog and mystic darkness. It is still the most romantic thing that has ever happened to me. I crept back in through my window that night, late and kissed, and with all my feelings about the luxury of the dark confirmed.

There is much to love in the night. I like that you can’t see much, that things are secret and wild, unrevealed and insubstantial. Perhaps because my heart is that of a writer, I love that you can’t see all of it. In the night, there are mysteries and uncertainties, and those empty spots where you aren’t quite sure what’s there are more than magical to me. The empty spots let me fill in the darkness myself. The night is like a coloring book; the lines are there, but the rest is up to me. You can wander or sit in the dark, writing stories about whatever may be in the gray spaces. There is more possibility in the dark.

As a grown-up, I still steal the nighttime moments where I can get them. I’ve always been near criminal when it comes to staying up too late. I love the hours after the family is asleep. My husband is in our bed, the girls are slumbering in theirs, so there are people here, but not really, and I am alone, but not really… and suddenly the world of possibility opens up in front of me. If I wake up in the night, I still get up and come downstairs, look out the window to test my night vision (it’s not that great anymore), and let my mind wander and think. Sometimes I make tea, and sometimes I sit in the night and I knit.

Don’t tell.

haven’t always been a knitter, but I learned when I was four, so I don’t really remember what it was like before I knit. Every now and then I’m on a bus or in a room with a bunch of other knitters, and I’ll hear one say, “you know, I just don’t know what I did before knitting,” and they look genuinely perplexed. People who used to sit on the bus without knitting all the time now look at other humans doing just that, and their minds boggle at the possibility. How are those people doing that? Did I ever do that? How many hats could I have made in all those bus rides? While I don’t know what I did before knitting, I understand the thoughts because I have a pretty good idea what I would do without knitting and, essentially, it can be summed up in two words. Poor behavior.

I would be unreasonable. I’ve often said that people only
think
I’m nice, or patient, or kind, and that really I’m no such things. My real personality is intolerant, impatient, judgmental, and possibly dangerous. It’s like knitting surrounds me with some kind of science fiction bubble of kindness or patience that’s activated by yarn. The minute that humanity or circumstance starts to bring out the worst in me, I flip the switch on my force field and zap! Personality reinforcements are generated around me. Forced to sit in a room with someone I find tiresome, annoying, or irritating, I have a choice. I can haul off and tell them that I think they’ve got the brain capacity of the hairball my cat hacked up and that their ideas have about the same content, or I can knit a row and calmly state, “I’m not sure I understand your premise.” If one of my teens is screeching about how I can’t possibly understand anything about her life and I’m ruining everything because raves are totally safe (it’s just that I’m old and stupid), I can haul off and scream, “Of course I’m ruining your dangerous and demented plans. You have only sixteen years’ experience on the planet, you think that nachos are a well-balanced meal, and that the guy with the ring in his nose is twenty-one years old and still in high school because he’s ‘deep!’” Or, I can knit a row and say, “I’m sorry, sweetie. I hear how upset you are, but you still can’t go to a rave.” Knitting while I wait for a doctor appointment is something to distract me from what I really want to do, which is stomp up to the receptionist and launch into a lecture about how my time is worth just as much as the doctor’s is, and how I simply am not putting up with his policy of double booking anymore, and, as a matter of fact, I’ll be revising his appointment book personally, right this minute, so that it shows some respect to the people who are supporting his career.

I knit when I worry, to help use up the time and space, and so that my vivid imagination doesn’t add fuel to the fire. I knit when I’m stressed, to help keep the peace, and so that I don’t make bad situations worse. In short, if I did not knit, I certainly wouldn’t be married, and I wouldn’t have friends, a job, or the ability to go out into public without slapping about twelve people a day—probably while drunk. Phrases like “a danger to herself and others” would be used, and, at the inquest, taking my knitting away from me would be cited as a major contributing factor to the “episode.”

I have said it before, and I’ll say it again. I do not knit. I am a knitter, and knitting is not something I do, it is a personality trait, and without my knitting, I would cope less well. (That’s an understatement. When I say I would cope less well, I mean that I think about chewing on the legs of tables. Metal ones.) This, the fact that I use knitting for comfort, patience, help, and sanity, is understood really well by my family and friends—so well that when my children were toddlers they would bring me my knitting if I looked upset. So well that my girls, now that they are big, will, instead of saying, “I have bad news,” will often precede a crappy report card or something else I won’t like with the statement, “Mum, I think you might want to knit for this one.” So well, that as I stood in my wedding dress, looking nervous, my friend Denny took my bouquet and replaced it with her knitting and asked if I wanted to “do a few lines to take the edge off.” I am knitting. Knitting is me.

Knowing this about myself, it is difficult for me to imagine not knitting, especially by choice, so I was as shocked as anyone when that is exactly what happened. At the bleakest time of last year—if you live in a northern place you’ll know this time, after all the leaves have fallen and been raked up but before the snow flies, when everything is gray and bare—my heart got broken.

It doesn’t matter what happened. Hearts get broken all the time. Marriages crumble, people die, there are bad accidents, reversals of fortune, intentional hurts, crushing disappointments, or surprises that one can’t bear. Every person is different, and to describe to you what broke my heart would only draw a divide between us. As humans we can’t help it, can we? You hear about something that’s a heartbreak to another human, and because you are strong where they are weak, you can’t understand how it would hurt them. You can often see it in the face of someone as you try to explain your heartbreak. As you tell someone about something that has knocked you down, kicked you in the stomach, kept you awake and sobbing for ten nights, and then took your lunch money, you see that as sympathetic as they are to you, as much as they love you, they’re sort of thinking, “That’s it? That’s what all this is about?” We’re all different, and all you need to know is that something broke my heart, and I was beyond sad—and most of my family went with me. The truth is that after years and years of being a remarkably blessed family, the forces that may be decided that it was our turn, and we got our share of hurt, disease, difficulty, and pain all in one go.

I cried. I cried in public, and really, I find crying in public so humiliating that I would rather be topless in a bar. (Okay, that’s not true. Me and my forty-two-year-old breasts would be humiliated by that as well. I’m just trying to make a point.) I can’t tell you of the hurt, and the sadness, and the way that I wondered if everyone I knew could ever be happy again, and the way that I envied people on the street who seemed happy to me. I barely ate. I scarcely spoke. I was comforted by my husband, friends, and family, but they were brokenhearted too, and it was a crappy system. I walked. I ran. I actually ran miles and miles, trying to outrun the hurt of it all. I ordered innumerable books on the topic of our hurt, but I didn’t read many of them. Joe and I went to the grocery store and couldn’t remember why we were there and ended up buying weird things we didn’t need because we knew we were there for something, and, damn it, how can a box of baking soda not help?

There were days and days in a row when I coped by reaching for my compassion so far that the stretch burned, and days when I coped by finding the kindness in others. Some days I coped by ignoring everyone, screening calls, or sleeping. Some days I called friends or took long baths. What I didn’t do was knit. Here I was, in one of the most trying circumstances of my life, and the thing that had always kept me sane didn’t appeal at all. It was confusing and worrying. What did it mean that I didn’t want to knit? Was I unraveling as a person? Was I still me?

I tried tempting myself with beautiful knits, the same way that one tempts the appetite of a person who’s been ill. All their favorite foods, all their favorite drinks, all to entice them back on the road to health. I got out my favorite yarns. Beautiful, gorgeous things I’d been saving. When that didn’t make me care about knitting, I went back to basics. Socks, hats, mittens—simple, good things—thinking that maybe if I started slow it would take hold again. I wasn’t the only one working on it either. My family and friends kept giving me yarn, handing me knitting, waiting for it to work like it always had. I kept taking it from them too, holding the knitting, trying to make it work so I would feel better. It didn’t work, though, and just as people feel ill at ease when a sick person won’t eat, that’s how upset we all were about the not knitting.

It’s been a long time since then, and what I didn’t know then, but I can speculate on now, is why I didn’t want to knit. For starters, I
am
knitting. For lack of a better phrase, knitting is knit together into who I am, and coming back to knitting meant coming back to myself, and myself was such a crazy place to be right then that I didn’t want to go there. I was sort of worried about being me. There was fear, and heartbreak, and indecision and a nightmare in which my normally effectual self was reduced to staggering around wondering with every breath if I was okay, or doing the right thing, making the right decisions, or even managing okay. Knitting would have been being myself, and I think it was only smart that I didn’t want to be anywhere near that person and her responsibilities right then.