By Shannon Williams
@shannon_scribbles

Made with love.

I think of this phrase often when I pull out my knitting needles to work on whatever project is tucked away in my knitting bag.

I think of grandmas baking trays of cookies for their grandkids. I think of my own great-grandma crocheting a baby blanket for me, a dozen great-grandchildren in. I think of friends who take pride in making Halloween costumes for their kids each and every year. I imagine the patience and sweetness and, yes, love, going into each and every one of these endeavors.

People, nothing I knit is made with love.

Don’t get me wrong, I always knit with plenty of emotion. But love? I don’t tend to knit when I’m feeling beatific and peaceful. No, I pull out my projects when my hands need something to hold onto. When the rest of me feels as though I may fly into a million pieces, knitting becomes, quite literally, that something to hold. This past year has shown me just how steadying having two knitting needles in my hands can be. I’m usually trying to find my sanity through knits and purls, not knit it in there.

 ***

I learned how to knit about a year ago, on a cold, mid-February Sunday morning. I’d been interested in knitting for a while. I watched several women at my church—old, young, and in-between—carry their knitting around in bags, getting in stitches during coffee hour or in the sanctuary. I saw them nod along to sermons or sing along to hymns without even stopping to look at the work in their hands.

It was Nancy who caught me on the stairs one day as we arrived at church the way we always did, in a flurry of too many children and winter coats and mittens.

“Would you like to learn how to knit?” she asked without even a hello. There was a sparkle in her eye as we walked down to the church basement and the kids sprinted ahead for cookies and small cups of juice.

“Yes!” I said, stunned at this random invitation being extended to me, somehow offering me exactly what I’d been thinking about for months. Call it an answered prayer that I’d never even bothered to pray or divine intervention if you will; we were in the middle of our church. “I’ve been wanting to learn for a while!”

“Meet me on the couches in the adult library next Sunday,” she told me, “Don’t worry about anything. I have extra needles and yarn. I’ll teach you.”

The following Sunday we met on the worn, cast-off couches. She arrived armed with a pair of needles and a brilliant purple skein of yarn to show me a basic knit stitch. It felt awkward and wrong in my hands. I kept forgetting if I needed to have the yarn in the back or the front of the stitch, mostly because I didn’t even know what that meant.

“Under, not over,” she would say from where she stood behind me. She put her hands gently on mine to correct me, though the yarn always felt like it moved too fast for me to understand what was happening. It was intimidating, me vs. those two awkward needles and a pile of yarn. I was convinced that although women had been doing this for centuries, it would be me who would be a failure, me who would never, ever get the hang of it. But, by the end of our twenty minutes together, I had a couple of lumpy rows of stitches.

I was distracted during the sermon that day, trying to picture what Nancy had taught me. At home, I pulled out the purple yarn and needles and found myself stuck. I was lost without Nancy to get me started again and the needles felt even more awkward than they had just a few hours earlier. YouTube got me just barely going before several stitches slipped completely off the needle. I looked in frustration at what I’d done without realizing how I’d done it. My brow furrowed as I pulled it all out and searched for more videos to learn how to cast on, so I could begin all over again. I felt hopeless.

I abandoned my new hobby to the chaos of life for a few weeks as February turned into March. Then mid-March rolled around. I picked it up again one day, during the first week of what turned into two weeks of Spring Break. On the couch where I sat, I felt the yarn in my hands and began again while a podcast about the new coronavirus played in my headphones. That purple yarn turned into a scarf for my daughter. Because she asked what I was making and the only thing I could think to say was “a scarf” because that’s basically a straight line and seemed reasonable enough.

“I want a scarf!” her twin brother piped up. I had to finish the purple one first, though, which took months, and involved more starting and stopping and unraveling and YouTube-ing during the early months of the pandemic. I coaxed yarn and maneuvered needles through our long days at home. The kids would watch what I was doing sometimes, offering helpful commentary such as “this is taking you awhile” and “when will you be done?” The bumps and incorrect stitches faded as I moved along; you can see, about halfway through, where it evens out and lays smooth. I completed it just in time for summer and the return of 70-degree weather (oh well).

I bought more yarn and started on the next one. It was new all over again as I learned the feel of a different yarn in my hands. This yarn was nautical in color, “jaunty” was the word that came to mind, as I knit through the dyed orange and cream, dark and light blue colors. It felt bright, sometimes too bright, as I watched stay-at-home orders and protests unfold and we continued to stay home, always home. That ball of yarn grew smaller as the scarf grew longer, with almost no mistakes this time. I could keep up a steady pace without looking at my hands, just like the women at church.

The year unfolded around me as I sat tucked into the far right corner of our couch. I knit during the silent reading portion of our distance-learning days and through pandemic updates while wondering if the grocery store would have rice and pasta that week. I knit after a man was murdered in my city, as rage bubbled up and burned just twenty minutes down the road, as we sat in our house during a governor-mandated curfew and watched how eerily quiet the streets were outside. I knit through debate after debate, through too much election coverage, and a week of waiting in early November. I knit through our return to full-time distance learning, with kids hovering nearby with both iPads and questions, as coronavirus cases in our country continued to rise, and rise, and rise some more.

I kept learning, kept knitting. I stopped to unravel my work less and less. And slowly, slowly, my hands steadied.

 ***

One of my most recent projects was a baby blanket for my new niece, born between Christmas and New Years’. It was the largest project I’d undertaken, knit in a hand-painted speckled yarn splotched with magenta and bright yellow, dark gray and sea green. Hopefully my sister-in-law doesn’t look too closely as she covers up my niece or she might spot the few places I slipped from seed stitch to knit stitch and back again. But the overall effect is soft, gentle, and cozy. It would have been nice, in theory, to sew in a tag that proclaimed it was “made with love,” but that thought was almost laughable. I’d worked on it over several weeks as fall turned into winter; into it were knit so many emotions.

I knit with anxiety through presidential debates and election results.

I knit with a restless faith as we participated in church via Zoom.

I knit with dread as I watched our governor’s coronavirus briefings.

I also knit with persistence while watching those same debates.

I knit with conviction during those same Zoom church gatherings.

I knit with gratitude as we learned of vaccines that would bring an end to this collective nightmare.

And always, always, with a relentless bit of hope.

All of this is what I hope for my new niece. And for my daughter with her scarf and my sons with theirs. I wish them a life focused not only on peace and gratitude and happiness but more. What sort of life would that be, without loss or burdens or passion? I want their hearts to beat with anger sometimes, righteous anger for the least of these. I want their pulses to quicken with passion over the ills of society, their minds to churn with ideas to make things better. I want them to recognize their fears and anxieties, not to be consumed with them, but to face them, and then to see who they are on the other side.

I want them to experience all these things, the fullness life has to offer. Anxiety alongside serenity, passion combined with peace, anger along with love. All of that I knit into a simple baby blanket.

Maybe I’m wrong about those cookies and that crocheted baby blanket and even those Halloween costumes. Maybe those aren’t made with love, either. Maybe they’re simply tangible things to hold onto when the world falls apart. Maybe none of these things were made with love to begin with, but instead they are the product of our collective persistence.

Guest essay written by Shannon Williams. Shannon is a writer, reader, Minnesota native, mom to three, and Enneagram 1. She believes firmly in the power of iced coffee and pedicures. Her work has been featured on Motherwell and Kindred Mom and she's a regular contributor to the Twin Cities Mom Collective. You can find her writing about motherhood and life at shannonscribbles.net and on Instagram.