All Wound Up

by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

  When it looked like maybe one of the pair were misplaced I thought she might be okay, but as we searched and rooted through her belongings it became more and more obvious that if we couldn’t find it, she was going to be unreasonable. When all was said and done, and the mitten was deemed gone for good, things got ugly. She cried, she slammed things around, and then we went and got a stiff drink, consorting with other knitters as we told knitting stories like we were veterans back from the war. We spoke of intricate or huge socks worn through, shawls that went through the wash and got felted, mittens that should have been on strings. We all sympathized, but in the back of my mind was one thing I didn’t say: I maybe don’t mind so much.

  Imagine for a moment, an alternate universe where, through a bizarre series of coincidences and inventions, all the knitting you make is permanent. The nefarious clothes moth is extinct—killed in a horrible lavender plague—and the only moths that remain are simply drawn to flames, not knitting. Somewhere along the line someone invented a washing machine so gentle that it can launder the most gossamer shawl without shrinking or mangling, and nobody has ever heard of a sweater sleeve getting caught under the agitator and summarily munched. There is now a fantastic spray that can remove any stain without ever harming any fiber, and someone has been round the whole world with a hammer so there isn’t a single exposed nail head waiting to snag your scarf and rip a hole in it. A very clever sort of ribbing is done now, and nobody ever has the trouble of hats getting so loose they fall over their eyes, and that has similarly solved the problem of the bottoms of sweaters eventually giving way and all becoming A-line maternity wear. Yarn doesn’t pill, car doors have sensors so that nothing, not even a scarf, can be caught in one, and, due to a terrible frostbite plague in the seventeenth century, mittens are all sacred items that are bonded to their owners. You are given one pair by a high priestess on your sixteenth birthday, and not only has nobody ever lost one, they can’t even imagine a scenario where one falls out of your pocket. Were you to suggest it, they would look at you like you just said you’re worried about an attack of flying camels. Mitten loss just isn’t possible. Just to cover all the bases, let us also say that stealing clothing (even accessories) is now a crime punishable by death, and that a blue laser comes out of the sky and immolates you if you so much as touch someone else’s sweater. The blue beam makes no exceptions for sisters, even if they did use your lip gloss and really, really need your green scarf because it is the only thing that goes with their coat. Nobody has committed a garment-related crime in seventy-four years out of sheer fear.

  In this world, think of who knitters are, what their position in society would be. If nothing ever wore out, got a hole, or became ratty looking with time, don’t you think that your urge to knit would rapidly make you unnecessary? Inside of a year or two you would pound out everything that a family needed, and then that would be it. In very short order, you’d be some crazed sort of pest that people worked at avoiding. Your proclivity for churning out mittens would be, in a world where they never went away, a nightmare. The people who love you would see you coming with their twenty-third hat, and since they would still have the first twenty-two, still in perfect condition, still taking up closet space, they’d just look at you bearing down on them with another piece of headgear and think, “Holy hell, are you serious? Is there no end in sight, you raving lunatic?” It would be a mere matter of months before you were avoided like the crazy person you would be. You’d eat alone. People would flinch when they saw you coming. Knitters would be feared. Nobody would even consider learning to knit, because knitters would be thought of as no more than magpies, hoarding up pretty things that nobody needs, while those who love them would be forced to smile and nod at the unending onslaught of scarves, sweaters, socks, and mitts. We’d die out, become extinct.

  Knitters already have an image problem. People already have a hard time thinking of us as important contributors to the clothing economy, but the truth is that they do need hats, sweaters, mitts, and scarves, and if we give them one before they go to the store (or after they lose or use up the one from the store) then at least we have need on our side. Angela’s lost mitten might be a sad, sad thing, with all that work gone forever, but at least now she needs another pair. Truth be told, if she hadn’t lost her mitten, if nobody did, then she’d be reduced to a non-essential worker in no time, not to mention what people would think of her exuberantly large stash. Think of how we all love shopping for yarn, making the decisions, picking the colors and patterns. I’m occasionally overwhelmed by all that there is out there, but at least it’s not a one-shot deal. I don’t have to pick yarn for the one hat my husband will always wear, every day, for the rest of his life. He needs one a year, and that means that buying and making him a hat isn’t an intensely loaded thing. Wouldn’t you be paralyzed by the pressure if you were only ever making your mum one scarf? Your son one sweater? In a world where Angela doesn’t lose a mitten, she doesn’t get the pleasure of deciding what the next pair will be and knowing that those will be loved and needed.

  I love the temporary nature of knitted things. I know who I am, and I know that if the world’s need for my knitting went, my need to knit would not. I know what I would do, too. About the time that people asked me to stop with the regular stuff, I’d get creative. Car warmers. Chair cozies. Panel curtains for large living rooms with high ceilings, carpets, pillows. I know I’m helpless to stop swathing the world in what I love, and so I love that mittens get lost, that socks wear out, that hats get grungy looking, shawls get lost, and that with time, love, care, and wear, most sweaters will eventually look like complete crap. I know that these are mostly things that knitters resent, but, if we look deeply, isn’t it a blessing of sorts? How else are we to find a lifetime of work and need—not to mention complete justification for what we’ve all got going on in the stash.

  THAT SORT OF MOTHER

  nce, in my career as a mother, I did something so shocking to the other parents and children of my neighborhood that it is still talked about. Even though my daughters are teenagers and a great deal of time has passed since that day, from time to time in the grocery store or when I am in the park, children will point and whisper, and every once in a long while, another mother will gingerly approach me and say, “Excuse me? Was it you? Did you really do that?” When this happens, all I can do is tell the truth. I put my shoulders back, touch her hand, and say, “Yes. It was me. I am that mother.”

  They are speaking of one afternoon late in August. It was a ripe August day, truly hot and steamy, when camp is over but school hasn’t started and everything is in limbo and nobody has anything to do. Actually, nix that. Mothers have plenty to do, and I did. It was my three daughters, Amanda, Megan, and Samantha—then about nine, seven, and four years old—who had nothing to do, or as they put it, “Nothing Good.” Every mum’s heard that. First they say they have Nothing to Do; then, as a mum, you serve up about forty-nine perfectly good things to do, all of which are rejected on unreasonable grounds. The sun is shining too hard to do chalk drawings outside. Their arms hurt too much to read books, Legos are too slow to build, their sister always messes up their paintings, it makes their eyes hurt to do beads, it’s too hot to knit because it makes the yarn sticky (that’s an excellent point, actually, but it was lost on me that afternoon). I served up idea after idea. They could get the play-clay and make pretend cupcakes, they could blow bubbles in the backyard in the shade, they could listen to music and color what it looked like. They could do any one of a thousand things I thought up, all of which were miraculous answers to the complaint “There’s nothing to do,” and the little darlings were against all of them. There were lots of things to do, but none of them were Good.

  Now, I am a mother of some experience. I know that if three children under ten have decided that there’s Nothing Good to do, I am both doomed and outnumbered, and the best thing to do is make a hasty retreat and hope for the best. Usually really having nothing to do puts Nothi
ng Good to do into perspective, and I find the parties more likely to negotiate after a small period of intense boredom. I told them to think about it, and I went upstairs to sort laundry, put away laundry, or bring a load of laundry down to the washer. (Those of you with wee ones will remember these days, in which everything is defined by the state or amount of the laundry. It’s a difficult phase. I once threatened to leave the lot of them for good because they changed outfits seven times a day and landed all wardrobe discards in the hamper. Nobody can be expected to withstand that sort of thing. It’s inhumane.) The point is that I went off to wage hopeless battle against something and to let them consider their position.

  Very little time had passed, maybe ten minutes, when I heard the giggling start. All three of them, chatting and giggling downstairs. If there had been an incident report filed for how that day went, that moment, the moment when I decided that the giggling meant that things were looking up instead of deciding that things were starting to get weird, that moment would be referred to as “mistake number one.” Worse than that, I’m certain that the incident report would also read (in the section under “mitigating factors”) that it was rather odd and inexplicable that a mother of my experience did not instantly acknowledge that if three related children of different ages were all giggling and entertained by the same thing, then it was only possible that the thing was a sign of the apocalypse, or at the very least threatened my health, happiness, or property. For whatever reason, I did not realize the danger we were all in at that moment. I did not throw down the stack of pink underpants I was filing in drawers, and I did not run downstairs at a dead tilt to find out what was making them giggle, and so what happened next was a surprise. I blame the heat.

  After a very short while (I know it was not very long because I had been working a dried apricot out of the carpet upstairs and by this phase in my mothering I was getting pretty good at that) the giggling erupted into laughter. This caught my attention. Like a mighty cat in the forest, I glanced up from the mashed fruit and cast my gaze toward the stairs, as though I might be able to hear better with my attention focused on the woodwork. My muscles tensed. Happy children, children that happy… they are up to no good. I poised for action. The laughter came again and I stood up. I started to move toward the door, just as the laughter erupted into hysterical screams of joy. The girls were suddenly whooping and squealing, laughing breathlessly—laughing in the way that every parent with their wits about them knows can only end in tears. Theirs, yours, the neighbors’—someone is going to be crying when children laugh like that.

  I practically vaulted the railing, propelling myself with the urgency that comes of knowing you have missed all the warning signs and have little time to avert total disaster. I was halfway down the stairs when I saw the first thing. The wall at the landing was wet. Water dripped down it, puddling on the floor and running along the baseboards, but I didn’t stop long enough to try and figure out how it happened. The water in the hall felt to me like it was going to be more of a tip of the iceberg thing, like the time I couldn’t find the goldfish and so I careened into the living room. I stopped. I stopped because what I saw when I entered that room was so unbelievable that I had absolutely no reaction prepared. Now, this is saying something. I am the mother of three very bright, active, and creative children. I am the mother of people who once tried to rappel over the upstairs railing using yarn. I am the mother of children who have tried to use the dryer as a hiding place, children who broke our VCR (actually, it wasn’t so much broken as “full”). I am the mother of children who have painted their sheets, cut each other’s hair, and longed for adventure. I am the mother of children who have tested me, the mother who owns at least fifty books on discipline (which I have read) and not once, not ever, no matter how much I was surprised, have I failed to come up almost instantly with consequences that were firm, made sense, preserved their self-esteem, and were intended to teach outrageously vivacious beings some damned sense.

  This was not the case as I stood in my living room that hot, steamy August afternoon. Here is what I saw. The walls were wet. The couch was wet. The chair dripped water onto the carpet, which (I realized as I stood there) was so sodden that it squished liquidly between my toes. One of the curtain panels had a large circular splash on it, and the window beyond dripped evidence as well. In the middle of this, incredibly saturated themselves, their hair hanging in dripping strings around their little faces (still glowing with the thrill of what they had done) stood my wee girls, each of them poised and clutching—and I can’t even hardly tell you how unbelievable I still find this—a fully loaded water balloon.

  That alone would be enough to put most mothers over the edge. Three children had a water balloon fight in my house. Worse than that, it wasn’t like three children broke into my house and had a water balloon fight; they were my own children. I froze. They froze. What happened next is a testament to my parenting self-control. As images of selling the lot of them into a child labor camp sprang to mind, as I felt my throat fill with anger and screams of unbelievable rage, I counted to twenty-three and took as many deep breaths (I tried counting to ten but a water balloon fight in the house calls for just so much more). When I’d regained something resembling composure, I took a step forward. The carpet sloshed under my feet.

  “Unacceptable,” I said, as calmly as the white-hot anger would allow me. “You three need towels to clean up this mess. Run. Run quickly.” They ran. They fetched every towel in the house and as they mopped it up (and I did the high places—the drips falling onto my back alerted me to the wet ceiling) I didn’t say much. Somehow, in my fury, I managed to convince myself that they weren’t actually hell-hounds sent to punish me for some of the things I did to my own mother (who was just going to love this) but instead that the girls simply didn’t have enough information. Sure, you would think that not whipping water-filled projectiles around the living room was common sense, but these are children. They have no common sense. It’s why we don’t let them vote, buy firearms, or carry lighters.

  When the worst of it was sopped up and the towels were put in the washer (by them, not me) I sat the three of them down on the couch and as water soaked uncomfortably into the bums of their shorts, I explained. I explained that I understood that I had never expressly forbidden water fights in the house, but that I was doing so now. I explained that it was uncool, damaging, and absolutely not anything that civilized people did. Ever. I showed them how wet things still were, and explained that the entire downstairs of the house was going to be wet for several days, as in this sort of humidity, things did not dry well. (I then added that even in lower humidity, I was still entirely opposed to the practice, just in case they thought it was a loophole.) I gave them a list of places that water was allowed to be in our house—the bathtub, the sink, glasses—and, to be clear, I followed it up with a list of places it could not be. Places like the dining room walls, the ceiling, or the brown chair by the window. My tone may not have been entirely calm during this phase, but I did resist the urge to scream “What were you thinking?!” As I mentioned before, I am a mother of some experience. I knew they weren’t thinking at all, or that they were thinking something that was so insane that if I had known what it was, it would have put me completely over the edge. All it would have taken was one nine-year-old looking me in the eye and saying something like, “You put water on the table when you wash it, what’s the big deal,” and I would have taken all of their belongings outside and stood there with the garden hose streaming onto the lot of it while shouting, “How do you like your stuff all wet!” just to show the ingrates what it felt like. (This is not an accepted method for teaching empathy and likely would have been poorly understood by my neighbors.)

  I was stern. I was disapproving, and, just like all the parenting books said to, I followed protocol. I told them what they had done was wrong. I told them that it could not happen again, I got them to clean up so that they had reasonable and related consequences for what the
y had done, and then I told them that they had made me very upset. That it would be some time before I felt right about this, and that smart girls would be getting some books to read and having a little quiet time while mummy went and had a bit of a lie down. (Points to me for not saying “a lie down and six gin and tonics,” though that was my impulse.) The ladies got books and sat down angelically to read. I staggered off, head pounding, wondering if this sort of thing ever happened to other mothers. (I bet it does. I think they just keep it a secret.) I lay down on my bed with my eyes closed, keeping an ear out for further mischief from the damp axis of evil allegedly reading Beatrix Potter stories to each other in the kitchen.