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It’s Come Undone: Crocheting and Catastrophe

… the human hand…has its own form of intelligence and memory.

—Elizabeth Zimmerman

Some of my earliest memories involve watching my mother crochet in our small living room nights when my father was away working his second job or out somewhere carousing. Oh, the bright and colorful afghans she made for her five children! Although I don’t remember her smiling while she crocheted, she seemed more serene than at other times, centered, surrounded by balls of yarn, an afghan slowly taking shape in her lap. Sometimes she worked with granny squares, stacking up hundreds of multi-colored squares next to her on the sofa, then, months later, stitching them together in a lively design, making a whole of pieces in ways I’m sure she wished she could do with the broken bits of her life with my father.

Even as a child I perceived the swirl of chaos around my father, who often came home late from work, smelling funny and slurring his speech. I sensed my mother’s crocheting was a way of creating a bit of calm in the frequent storms my father choreographed, storms that included strange women calling our house late at night, strange women’s jewelry found in his car, increasing DUIs, car accidents and hospitalizations until, finally, just short of his 60^th birthday, his liver in an advanced state of cirrhosis, he slipped into a vegetative state and died a few months later. In those years, I kept a journal and wrote poems in secret, which became my way of reflecting on my father’s life, since my mother rarely talked about it unless forced. Instead of talking, instead of writing, she crocheted.

My mother has shared with me that crocheting all those years was, for her, a form of meditation. Instead of doing almost nothing, as in traditional meditation, with one’s hands, hers were always moving, always in contact with the yarn she was looping and yarning over and pulling through in a rhythm I now understand, as a crocheter myself, underlies any thoughts scuttling about in your brain. Whatever else you might be thinking about while crocheting, you usually must be counting—one single crochet front loop only; one back loop only, skip one stitch; three single crochets in the next stitch, repeat until you have 150 stitches. Counting underlies all your thoughts in crochet, giving them a substance and song they might otherwise not have had.

If you’re mourning some loss, as my mother often would have been—not only did she lose her husband over the years to other women and drink, but both her younger sister, and her troubled son, my brother, died young of drug overdoses—the yarn slowly but surely binds you to that loss. Maybe your stitches take on the shape of your grief, swelling as your eyes 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 lost the prescription bottle of Adderall.

The next morning the police informed me he still had so much alcohol in him that they could not even bring him in front of the judge for sentencing. They suggested one option to protect him might be to have him committed 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 20^th 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.