In any other scenario, I'd kill to be Jennifer Connolly.

This photo is a metaphor for my life.

My ultimate goal has always been: be a Mom.  

When I was in first grade, when my teacher asked us to draw a picture of what we would be in the future, to make the world a better place, I drew a picture of me getting married (implication: make the world a better place by having kids and being a good Mom).  She said I did it wrong, made me cross it out, and instead draw a picture of recycling or being president or something like that on the other side.


When I was in elementary and middle school, I went to visit my aunt with the sole purpose of playing Mother's Helper and taking care of my baby cousins.


My first job was babysitting.  I did it for years, until my sister, D, had a baby and I could play the role of dutiful aunt and change diapers and play with my niece (and nephews, and more nieces from M in the years to come).


When I was in high school, we had to research and write a paper on our chosen career path.  I suffered complete writer's block, because I knew my English teacher was looking for more than "Stay At Home Mom".  I landed on "Kindergarten Teacher" because, well, it's the closest thing to SAHM I could think of.  My friend suggested "Actuary" because I was really good at Math, but I politely declined.  This fact would turn out to be poetic ... or perhaps ironic? ... about 10 years later when I sat for my first Actuarial exam.  And in my own defense, it was my last.


I went to college, because I genuinely wanted a degree and a career.  After all, I loved learning and French and Math, and English, too, in fact, and higher learning and a career was important to me.  It also sat at the back of my mind that I could always put this career on hold while I became a stay-at-home mom and return to it once the kids were in school.  And since I didn't have a high school sweetheart, I obviously needed to meet a college sweetheart.

I had a college sweetheart, but he turned out to be a Stage 4 Clinger.  Not really, but that's a fun phrase.  He was actually a codepedent, depressed intellectual who was so intellectual he dropped out of college.  Twice.  And apparently I have a soft spot for men who need fixing because I can't tell you how many times I called to wake him up for class or chapel or prayed for him to be the man I wished he was, until, five years later, I realized he wasn't.  That sounds terrible, and this is worse: I was looking for the father of my children.

I'm really making myself sound neurotic and crazy.  It's not like I obsessed over kids or purchased maternity clothes or "forgot" a pill every now and again.  Or even ever.  For crying out loud, I was 20 years old!  But the plan was always there, delicately lingering at the back of my mind: get married, be a good wife, have kids, be a good mom.  It was my Calling.

And life continued to happen, and I continued to meet men who were not the father of my children.  But I didn't let that stop me.  I made decisions in my life that I thought would prepare me for my ultimate, stable, predictable goal: I continued to advance in my career, and I bought a house.  As it turns out, the latter was the worst decision I ever made in my entire life.  I'm not kidding.  It was like a version of me trying to "live up to my potential," as Ms. Penelope Truck put it.  I am still recovering from that one, really, really, bad decision, and though the house sold a few months ago, the end is nowhere in sight.

Only now, at long last, later in life than I ever intended, now I've finally met the father of my children.  And reader, I married him.  (sigh. Jane did it so much less cheesy than I did)

But now I wonder.  As my career has taken front and center stage, and I am the breadwinner of the family, and I'm enjoying spending every available waking minute with the love of my life, dreaming of finally making it into the black and traveling around the world, but all the while the economy is tanking more than anyone ever thought it would, and like I said, my financial recovery is nowhere in sight ... 


I wonder if all along I've just been Jennifer Connolly.  Racing up and down crazy Escher-esque stairs, through beautiful stone archways, following that ever-elusive baby.  I'm going to finally fall through space and time, verbally duke it out with David Bowie, and return to accept the harsh reality of being a perma-babysitter.  I've extended the metaphor too far.  


The point is, while I've been scheming and dreaming, life has been happening and for better or worse, I'm childless.  Am I missing the point?

How It All Began

Christians have conversion stories about how they converted to Christianity.  I've also got one of those, but this blog is a different genre, so I'll stick with How I Converted To Knitting.  It's true, I was converted.  By Vickie Howell.  I guess it started before her, but she was the main catalyst.

Knitting for me has been a learning experience, a development ... or to be more dramatic, a metamorphosis.  Hell, it could pass as a pure metaphor for my life.  I've made lots of mistakes, I've started back at square one, I've unraveled, I've gotten tangled up in knots, I've struck inspiration, I've hit dry spells, I've left things undone, I've improvised, I've broken rules, I've enjoyed successes and failures ... ok so I've never been much of a poet, but you get the idea.  One of these days, I'm going to tell my boss I need to frog back to the beginning and start over on one of my projects at work (in insurance, mind you), and she's going to look at me like I have baobabs growing out of my face.

I can't pinpoint what it was that first made me want to try knitting.  I do know I was in high school.  Maybe it was when my mom got involved in the prayer shawl ministry at church, and watching her, it just looked like something I could enjoy.  Maybe it was when I found out about my Grandma's book, Twice-Knit Knitting, the one that pretty much got my parents together (but that's a story for another day).  Things in my life just sort of seem to pop up as recurring themes before they feature as a main topic.

Or maybe I just found myself in the yarn aisle at the craft store.  Yes, in fact, I think that was it.  Glamorous?  No.  But there it is.  I was at one of those big box craft stores - you know, the ones that carry aisles and aisles of "yarn" (well now, someone's turned into a bit of a yarn snob).  I was with my mom, and I asked her if she'd teach me how to knit.  We bought a skein of plain, acrylic/wool worsted and a pair of needles, and the rest is history (too cliche ... argh, where do they hide the accent aigu?) thus a knitting phenom discovered her calling!

Um, hardly.  The needles felt awkward in my hands (despite having mastered other tactical challenges like folding origami cranes and using chopsticks - shout out to four years of Japanese exchange students: Sakura, Yoko, Maho, and Takako).  I couldn't grasp the concept of making a slipknot.  I started off with the only cast-on method my mom remembered - the simple one, where you essentially have a string of cursive "e's" on your needle.  I had at it for a while, reading along with I Taught Myself Knitting.  And I'm fairly certain I abandoned that first effort soon afterward.

But I picked it back up, I did.  Ok, so a few years went by, and I was in college, and I needed something to do between scenes of a college play. The second attempt only went slightly better than the first.  And I confess: I dabbled in crochet.  It became sort of an obsession.  I spent a few months crocheting to my heart's content.  And then I knit a scarf, I think.  And that was it for a while.  Techniques and terms and fibers and needles lay dormant, marinating.


Until 2006.  I was living in my first house, just purchased, and I stumbled upon the show "Knitty Gritty" with Vickie Howell, on HGTV.  I was hooked.  I DVR'd each and every episode.  I learned names like Lily Chin and techniques like "long-tail cast-on".  Something about seeing knitting up-close, performed live by real knitters ... I'd be lying if the pleasure I got didn't make me feel like something of a voyeur.  There was a flurry of fiber activity, and a true knitter was born.  After a seven-year progression from larva to pupa to chrysalis ... I was a beautiful butterfly.  Why yes, I do sicken myself sometimes with inclination to cliche (insert accent aigu).


From then, I knitted not just scarves, but hats, and mittens, arm warmers and socks.  I started a vest and sweater (I'm better at starting than finishing).  So I'm not an expert knitter, but I'm not a novice, either.  I'm proficient.  All thanks to Vickie Howell.


Which is why, right now, even though I have cast on and ripped out the same mitten four times, I refuse to bad-mouth the Vickie Howell for Caron's Sheep(ish) yarn, difficult though it may be, and though it splits and breaks and somehow refuses to follow its own gauge, I will not stoop to calling it cheap, or resort to name-calling, even though it's completely good for absolutely nothing.  Because I owe her.  She converted me to knitting.

Mrs. Pi