I've been doing a very great deal of knitting lately.
I became incredibly ill with the flu a few weeks back (not hospital ill, but bedridden, I-can-see-how-this-kills-people ill) and it's not an exaggeration to say that the experience altered me. Most of us don't often lie in bed for days with nothing to occupy us but our own minds (I was too ill for reading or even knitting); it was, in its way, a sort of retreat. I had time to consider a number of problems, and allow good sense to settle down into some of them, to loosen them up.
In the weeks since I've felt quite calm.
I think the great lesson of parenthood, or of personhood, actually, is fluidity: how to move along with the current of life and not fight it so much.
You can't fight kids. You can't make them something they're not, developmentally or personally, you can't make them eat vegetables or go to sleep when you desperately want them to or stop a two year-old from making her endless rounds of destruction. You can't force change in a partner, or, say, an overly intelligent dog.
There is some crazy Zen magic in acceptance, in rolling with it. I am convinced that it's the fundamental source of internal quiet. Having touched it, the complexes built up around the human effort to explain it and transmit it to other people seems very funny and slightly sad: peace, which I think everyone wants whether they can acknowledge it or not, is stupidly simple, it is right there, all the time...but explaining what that means, and how to get there, and how to stay, is extremely hard. I couldn't possibly do it.
But not fighting is a good start. For me, that more or less means not running away from responsibilities, actually physically staying put where I'm needed and doing what needs to be done. Where I'm needed right now is in my house. "Out" with the kids is easy. Home is hard. But I'm accepting that there's nothing out there that's going to change how I feel and how I structure my time and what I accomplish here. And in a larger sense, something is settling down in my gut that hasn't really ever settled before. That sense of searching for some kind of remedy, a fix, has eased up. It's a tremendous relief.
But back to the knitting.
Having some handwork to sit down with in between the endless tasks of mothering is a huge help: it feels good, physically, to do it. It is something generative, productive, and calming to do in the lulls of the day. It makes home, and all that being at home entails, much more appealing. And it feels like mine. Just mine. That's important.


Square one of Mitered Crosses Blanket, in the gorgeous Cascade Yarns Eco Duo and, as per revelations and resolutions made in a state of fevered delerium, scrap yarn:

It'll take a while. There's a lot of picking up stitches and changing yarns and whatnot, so the squares are time consuming.
I'm not even going to think about all of the ends that will need winding in once all the squares are done.
Later. That's for later.
